by Ed Lin
The skin. I should peel the jujubes and grill the skin separately, creating a crunchy alternate layer between jujube slices.
I made three test skewers and gave the best one to Frankie, the second-best to Dwayne and I ate the ugly one.
“This is the vegan option,” I declared. “We could end up doing this on a regular basis.”
“If it doesn’t suck,” said Dwayne.
“It doesn’t suck,” I said forcefully. “It’s delicious.”
“I mean, if the sales don’t suck.”
I straightened myself. “People will buy them.”
Frankie looked over his skewer. “They look good,” he said.
“Try it,” I said. I watched them begin to eat and waited for sounds of approval before eating mine. I was completely right about the chili. The overall profile tasted like a caramel apple with ice cream and some heat.
Now that I had something perfect, I had to find a way to get the usually reticent masses to properly appreciate my art by paying for it.
I made a bilingual sign for the jujube skewers with Vegan Special at the very top. I handed out samples on toothpicks, something I almost never did, but I had no idea how this thing would go. It was against my nature to reach out and give things away, but I was rewarded with their stunned and silent smiles.
I cajoled English-speaking tourists to get at least two because these fruits were only available for a short time. Which was not a lie at all. Nancy accuses me of flirting with the women but if I am, it’s just an aspect of my friendly alter ego.
On the back end, Dwayne pleasantly scorched skewers on the main grill while Frankie stirred and seasoned the stews on the back burners. Frankie cast a mildly sorrowful look at my customers from time to time, pitying the people paying for food that didn’t even include any meat.
The jujubes exceeded my cynical expectations and rewarded my deep-seated need to create by doing great. Some meat-eaters picked one for dessert. After two hours, I made back what I had spent on the two sacks of fruit.
And they were still moving!
I cycled through my three mostly truthful pitches that addressed the most popular afflictions. For the people worried about their weight, I told them that skewers were low in fat. For the people a little timid about eating foreign foods, I told them that if they were already familiar with barbecue and stews, those methods of cooking originated in the Caribbean and the Middle East, respectively. For those who wanted to try the most Taiwanese thing I had, well, I’d pick whatever was lagging.
Ordinarily, I’d be thrilled about the night we were having, but I was slightly sick inside. I wanted so badly to feel my phone buzz with a text from Peggy telling me that everything was over and the cops had rescued Tong-tong.
I became antsier as the hours ticked by. The more I thought about jail, the more I didn’t want to go—not even to visit. After all, I had seen The Silence of the Lambs. I saw what that guy did to Jodie Foster when she passed by his cell!
We hit an inevitable lull and I decided to take the initiative. I came around Dwayne and pinned his arms back while he struggled to keep his head up.
“Hey, not fair!” he howled. “I told you before, I’m in pain!”
I managed to hold on as he thrashed. Wow, wrestling was relieving my stress—as long as I had the upper hand.
I had a good view of Frankie’s face. His typical reaction to our horseplay was silent amusement as long as the equipment was out of harm’s way and there were no customers waiting. Tonight, though, instead of watching us, he rolled his eyes and washed up in the sink.
I worked a hand free and pulled a dirty move by tickling Dwayne’s left armpit. The big guy could take anything but being tickled.
“Oh, shit! Oh, fuck! Get away from me!” Dwayne scampered back to safety behind the grill. He picked up a pair of greasy, blackened tongs and snapped them at me like a dirty crab claw. “Back off, Jing-nan, or I’ll rip off your face and throw it on the grill!”
“Hey!” yelled Frankie in a tone that seemed too harsh. “Are you guys working tonight or not? Did we run out of food to sell? Jing-nan, get out front and do your stuff!”
Dwayne and I were both stunned. I raised my hands.
“Okay, Frankie. We’re sorry. We’re going back to work.”
I couldn’t help feeling that Frankie’s irritation was rooted in the fact that he knew a lot more about the kidnapping than he had let on earlier. Seeing the news clip of the men in cages on Dwayne’s phone probably dribbled more sand into his shell.
About fifteen minutes went by before a decent wave of tourists approached. I leapt into them like a bodysurfer.
Chapter 6
Frankie sidled up to me as the night was winding down, choosing a moment when Dwayne was in the can.
“I might know somebody who might know someone else who knows something.” Frankie looked defeated. I looked down at his hands. He was trying to pick a hangnail.
“If it’s any imposition,” I said, “please don’t bother looking into it. After all, let’s see what my friend in jail says.”
He grabbed my arm loosely. “I’m doing this because I need to know. I don’t want to have this feeling that I could have helped even a little bit. Things are more serious now.” He tightened his grip and when our eyes met he nodded.
That scared me. Frankie is an unflappable sort of guy but now, with the release of the video, he thought that things were dire enough to tap his criminal network for a route to save Tong-tong’s life.
At the end of the night, Dwayne went home to soak in a tub, I went home with a bag of leftovers for Nancy, and Frankie went shrimping to connect with his old acquaintances.
Shrimping places are open twenty-four hours a day. Most of the time, families with small children and even some tourists try to catch shrimp in stocked pools using baited fishing poles. You pay by the hour and you get to salt-roast your catch in nearby ovens.
After midnight, the clientele changes a bit and becomes a bit less family-friendly. Sure, there are harmless drunk kids hanging out after a night of partying but you’ll also notice a contingent of older guys in shades, looking a little comical sitting on plastic stools and holding those playfully colorful fishing rods. They are the old-school gangsters, the ones who remember how the grudges began and how easy it all used to be. There’s no retirement from the criminal life, however, and they stand by waiting for a call that might never come, and ready to provide alibis as necessary.
Why, Mr. Officer, they might say. Lee was with me that night. We were shrimping until five in the morning—here’s the receipt!
I hoped Frankie could hook something more substantial than shrimp and war stories.
I called Peggy as I made my way through the closing night market. I dodged people using their backs rather than their legs to lift and carry boxes—some empty, some full—to their cars. We were right up against midnight but I knew my classmate would be up.
“Jing-nan,” she said.
“Peggy, I know it’s late, but I wanted you to know that Frankie is looking into matters. Have the cops found anything yet?”
“They found their fingers up their asses,” she spat.
“I’m sure the cops are doing their best.”
“They’re both asleep now. Drunk.”
“You got them drunk?”
“I didn’t force ’em to drink. Anyway, I’ve been going through their stuff. Emails and notebooks. Looks like everyone out in the field is just playing wait-and-see instead of being proactive. Even after that video.”
Cops probably don’t take too kindly to people rifling through their belongings. Nobody does.
“You’d better leave their stuff alone.”
“There should be agents out there busting in doors, but instead they’re watching the video again and again!”
I envisioned a buzzed Peggy wan
dering around her apartment, carelessly kicking around the contents from the cops’ bags and wallets. With her guardians passed out, she was a danger to herself and the investigation.
“Listen, Peggy, keep the blinds down and stay away from the windows.”
“Okay, Mr. Paranoid.”
She hired two cops to be her security detail and had the nerve to call me paranoid.
“Don’t insult me when I’m doing all I can to help. I’m going to Taipei Prison tomorrow morning for you. That’s already beyond what I think is reasonable.”
“Feel free to use force on him, Jing-nan. If he wants to shake hands, bend his middle finger backwards until he tells you where the chip design is.”
“That’s not my style.”
“Then just show up and put your head down and mope. You’re pretty good at that. After a minute or two, he’ll be so frustrated he’ll do anything you say.”
My grip on my phone tightened. I had to remind myself that her dad was in danger and that her judgment was currently impaired. She wasn’t aware that the words she was using were hurtful, but was she ever?
“It’s time to say good night, Peggy.”
At the entrance to my building, I had to shake my entire body to get rid of the bad vibes as I fished out my keys. I went up to my apartment and proudly held up the bag of leftovers to Nancy as if I were returning from a successful hunt. She nodded and looked at me tentatively. She must have seen the video. Most of Taiwan probably had.
I had brought her favorite skewers, the chicken butts, but maybe her appetite had been ruined already.
Nancy tilted her head and crossed her arms. “Did you see that video clip, Jing-nan?”
I put down the bag and let her hold me to comfort herself. “I did. It’s terrible. What an awful thing.”
She patted my back and withdrew. “Do you think they’re going to kill Tong-tong?”
“I don’t think so. They’re just trying to scare Peggy into giving them that chip design.”
She opened the bag and unwrapped the skewers. So her appetite wasn’t ruined. “They scared half the country!”
“The cops will save Tong-tong in the end. I’m sure.”
“How can you be sure?”
I stepped back and put my hands on my waist. This was an opportunity for me to tell her. “For one thing, I’m going to be helping them.”
She picked up a chicken-butt skewer, took a big bite and talked through chews. “How are you going to be helping the police?”
“I’m going to see a man tomorrow who has the chip design that the kidnappers want.”
“Why do you have to go? Who is this guy, anyway?”
“I’ll tell you once you’ve swallowed that bite.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Please, just swallow.”
“All right, I just did.”
“It’s your former sugar daddy, Ah-tien. I’m going to visit him in jail.”
Red patches appeared at the tops of her cheeks and began to spread all over. “Are you kidding me, Jing-nan?”
I put my hands together in a pleading gesture and lowered my head to show her how serious I was. “I wish I were joking around. Believe me, Nancy, he’s the last guy in the world I want to see. You know that.”
She continued eating the skewer automatically as her eyes rolled upward to review a memory. “I feel so bad for him.”
I said what popped into my head. “That guy can go straight to hell!”
The red patches grew larger and made the leap to her ears. “He was never anything but good to me, Jing-nan. Do you understand that?”
I had to bite my tongue. The last time we “discussed” Ah-tien, I ended up sleeping on the couch. I took a deep breath and felt the inhaled air move down to my spleen, where mental fixations are stored, according to an herbal-medicine infomercial that plays continuously on every channel.
I could use a dose of that now, if it worked. I wished I had no apprehensions about meeting Ah-tien. I wished he meant nothing to me. Well, maybe he should mean nothing to me. After all, I had still been in love with someone else when Nancy was briefly entangled with him. It’s not like he had stolen her away from me. It’s not like she had chosen him over me. He was just someone out of her past.
And yet, just thinking about him made me want to punch him out. That just wouldn’t do well for a jail visit.
I regarded Nancy. She was annoyed with me but I could see that she was also sad that I couldn’t get past this. Why couldn’t I? Even if I claim to be stubborn and idealistic, which I am, I couldn’t let that be a line in the sand between my girlfriend and me. There probably shouldn’t even be sand between us.
“It is not the first choice of either of us for me to visit him,” I said with caution. “But Ah-tien may be the only hope to save Tong-tong.”
Nancy nodded. “I’m glad you said that,” she said. “I think he will help you.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I mean, Ah-tien has nothing to lose, at this point. Maybe they’ll reduce his sentence for helping the investigation.”
“How long is he in for?”
Nancy bit into the skewer and twisted her head slightly to tear away a chunk of meat. She chewed a few times before pushing her food into one cheek so she could talk. “You should do some homework before you go meet him. Ah-tien will be much more amenable if you show him you know his story.”
She brought me to the couch and swung up the lid on her laptop. The screen lit up and she typed in a video-sharing service. We reached a thumbnail picture of a guy behind bars and Nancy hit play.
“This is from last month,” she said.
A middle-aged prisoner dressed in a white T-shirt with long sleeves rolled up to the elbows and faded blue shorts sat alone at a table. His crew cut looked like a white mold that covered most of his scalp. He had been eating well but his eyes looked like hell behind his glasses. Ah-tien’s face glistened as if brushed with egg yolk. His nose twitched rabbit-like as he awaited the decision of an off-camera judicial board.
Despite his timid looks, Ah-tien had been designated a class-three prisoner, one class below what a convicted murderer would be. He was attempting to have that lowered to class two, which would give him more personal freedoms, a chance to move to a less-restrictive facility and an earlier shot at parole.
I took in another deep breath for my spleen. I had never tried to picture Ah-tien. I preferred to think of him as a faceless, Gollum-like creature confined to a cell. He was Nancy’s sugar daddy for about a year. He had bought her a sports car and a swanky apartment that turned out to be in the same building as Peggy’s. Then his corrupt dealings caught up with him. He was convicted of paying an official to circumvent the normal bidding process in order to get his company’s laptops into New Taipei City’s school district. The official later decided he was getting lowballed so he turned in Ah-tien.
Let that be a lesson to the business community: Always bribe more than what the government is offering to whistleblowers.
There wasn’t much movement in the video, apart from seeing Ah-tien wipe his forehead or his mouth. I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. I have often thought about physically hurting him in many different ways, but now I couldn’t even make a fist as I watched him sitting in his chair, drooping like a neglected plant whose owners were on vacation.
Someone offscreen announced that due to the seriousness of Ah-tien’s conviction, he would remain a class-three prisoner. He actually straightened up slightly and nodded. It was his expected result. His lawyer drank some water and swished it in his mouth.
The system had really made an example of Ah-tien, the poor bastard. If I were in high school, I’d be terrified to end up like him. Jailed, old, resigned and fated to dress like shit to the end. He was serving a forty-year sentence, which effectively looked like a life term.
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As the camera focused on his face, I reached out and hit the spacebar, pausing the video. He looked resigned to whatever fate had in store. Maybe that included handing over the chip design to me.
“I feel terrible for him,” I said. “That’s a really long sentence for a nonviolent crime.”
“Murderers have gotten less because they can claim insanity,” said Nancy. “But you know what? Business crime destroys the lives of multiple people. Remember Bernie Madoff in America? He destroyed entire institutions, including charities.”
“I think it will do some good if he serves out his sentence. Seeing what Ah-tien looks like will scare people straight.”
She adjusted the angle of the display. “He’s lost a lot of weight.”
He used to be ugly and fat, I thought but didn’t dare say. I licked my lips.
“Nancy,” I said. “Please try a jujube skewer. I saved it for you. It was today’s vegan special, our first.”
She took a few bites. “It’s good, but maybe it could be spicier,” she said, putting me on the defensive.
I took a small bite to see if it was an outlier of tonight’s batch. “It’s got the right amount of seasoning,” I said. “It tastes different when it’s hot.” I sat down and raked my tongue over my top teeth. “You’re right, though. The spices could be better. Not hotter but it should be more coarse. Something granular to make the mouthfeel a little rougher and more pleasurable.”
“Um,” she said. “It’s really good as it is. I’ve never tasted anything like it. The skin is a great touch. What kind of skin is it?”
“It’s the actual jujube skin.”
Nancy looked puzzled. “What’s wrong with the color?” she asked. Why was everyone in Taiwan obsessed with skin color—even that of fruit?
My bedroom has an excellent view of a patch of dirt where stray dogs used to gather and fight. I had always assumed that something was supposed to be built in the neighborhood park but that the money had run out.
At around six in the morning a cataclysmic sound came from the park, waking both of us up. It sounded like a giant child’s toy chest had been dumped.
