Toe Popper

by Jonny Tangerine

  After performing the public execution, Major Lane was quickly transferred by the Army. Technically the kid was a combatant, but there was a psychological notation placed on Lane’s record that kept him out of future combat zones.

  Lane had kept Aimee’s engagement ring on his dog tag chain for a year. Then he’d thrown it in the Indian Ocean, it had gotten too heavy to carry around with him. Every time he looked at it, he would remember removing it from her lifeless finger

  He often wondered what his father would think about what’d he’d done. Lane’s father had entered the Army as an All-American class full back on the division team. People outside the Army didn’t realize how serious inter-division sports were. The generals competed hard and starters were kept well out of harm’s way on various special assignments. Lane had been recruited by his division’s baseball team, but he hadn’t gone into the officer corps to play baseball.

  Now, according to The Stars and Stripes, the Boy Scouts seemed to be obsessed with sex and politics. There was precious little of either when Lane was scouting, although he occasionally had adolescent fantasies about his Republican den mother.

  Lane grabbed the Los Angeles Magazine off the nightstand and stood up on the bed. A quick fake got the bloated mosquito into the air. He pancaked it just above the painting. He felt mild satisfaction, but the vivacity of his own blood against the peach wall looked like a bad omen.

  Lane stepped out on the terrace and lit a Gitane. The death of his fiancée was a terrible memory, but many more had replaced it. So when his mind reached back to it now, it did not affect him as much as it used to. Lane hoped nothing would destroy the work he’d done in Cambodia while he was gone. And he was concerned for Lieutenant Rahman. The man had the kind of military discipline that stood up in all situations, but he didn’t seem to have much common street sense.

  An urgent knocking interrupted his thoughts.

  Lane opened the door and found a human of indeterminate gender wearing a beige smock. He/She resembled Nang Toon – the champion Thai kickboxer who had a sex change operation.

  Lane stared. He was baffled, not even the hands gave him a clue.

  “Sorry.” The housekeeper said.

  Lane nodded. That’s what housekeepers always said, but they all knocked anyway.

  WILL ROGERS STATE BEACH – 6:17 A.M.

  Huay sat in his car looking at the sign for the Will Rogers State Beach and contemplated what it meant to be a cowboy in America. A man of the land. A rugged individualist. A lone ranger. Huay knew this was one of the biggest myths about the United States. Doing things by yourself was not a good way to get ahead in a capitalist society. It wasn’t even a good way to herd cows. As a kid Will Rogers had been a real cowboy, but as an adult he’d fallen in love with wearing bathing suits and playing polo. Huay learned this when he had toured the man’s house on Sunset (a preserved historical landmark, but less than a hundred years old.) He’d sat on his leather couch. Twirled one of his lassoes. Ultimately Huay decided the Will Rogers Estate wasn’t iconic enough to be a target. And also that, like many rural American heroes, the man probably hadn’t been capable of raising even a carrot.

  Huay thought that many of the homeless men he saw up on the bluff in Santa Monica still believed in the lone ranger myth. The free individual. The power of solitude. But humans were never meant to live alone. Like elephants and chimpanzees and dolphins humans needed a strong social structure to survive. Huay always knew he needed to surround himself with people who shared his interests. Not just a sidekick either. Huay was alone on this part of the plan, but only because it made the most sense from a security point of view. He had his mine suppliers, a network of entrepreneurs ready to invest heavily in the homeland, and safe houses set up in Cambodia. He was not operating alone.

  Countries were the same. That had been Cambodia’s mistake. Pol Pot had everything he ever wanted, but for some reason he thought their tiny country didn’t need help or friendly neighbors. The Comrade Secretary had been raised in quiet comfort by a ballet teacher, distantly related to the royal family, but something had clearly gone wrong. Paranoid violence and corruption began almost immediately - quickly followed by war against North Vietnam and betrayal of China, its only ally and trading partner. None of the policies made sense, like a petulant teenager hating his parents for providing food, clothing and shelter. It was truly a case of the inmates taking over the asylum.

  Sitting in Paris, Huay had heard rumors, but didn’t know how bad it was getting until it was too late. The atrocities, the insanity of the forced agrarian movement. Starting the calendar over. Destroying clocks and watches. Abolishing money. Not surprisingly, the beast quickly began to feed on itself. When people begin to starve, clear thinking is the first thing to go.

  The first attempt to purge Huay was made in Paris. He was followed home on the Metro. The knife-wielding assailant rushing up behind him on the dark stairwell of his Right Bank pension. A fortunate instinctive mule kick the only thing that saved his life.

  Huay left immediately for the telephone exchange. He discovered his connected relatives in the Universities, initially embraced, were all disappeared. His boss was already dead – executed at Tuol Seng Prison.

  Huay had flown to Bangkok. Joined the resistance. Then served time as a spy with a Khmer Rouge scout unit, where he really learned how to kill.

  So many diabolical tactics. Trap after trap -- the rice soup made with poison frogs, a mere taste could kill. Bamboo bicycles with the frames packed with explosives – triggered by fifty pounds of pressure placed on the seat. It could incapacitate a whole squad if they were standing close enough together. He awoke every morning convinced that the day ahead would bring his death.

  And then he had escaped the nightmare. After assassinating a Khmer Rouge comrade-officer he’d found a pack rat’s cache of gold and silver -- teeth, pens, glasses, rings, fillings, and watches. And at the same time, the price of precious metals soaring – Nixon had removed the U.S. dollar from the gold standard and the price was going up every day.

  The blood money allowed Huay to return to Bangkok, buy a Vietnamese passport and an expedited political asylum visa. And after purchasing a coach-class ticket on Pan Am, Huay still had a small stake for when he got to America.

  At the Camp Pendleton processing center Huay’s immigration counselor (after discovering that he had cash) hooked him up with a partner, another recent immigrant who wanted to buy a taxi in Orange County. It was a perfect match.

  They rented a single garage, but the taxi was rarely in it. They each drove twelve hours a day. Slept in a loft in the rafters of the garage, showered with a cold hose behind it. Used the floor drain, public parks and gas stations for bathrooms. They did all their own maintenance (usually between three and five am) and used a hand crank siphon to fill their car with tax-free black market gas purchased from other immigrants. The rest of the time was spent driving and hustling. Always driving - businessmen to meetings at Disneyland hotels and Newport office parks. Always hustling - kickbacks to doormen and desk clerks for airport fares and charters to the Mexican border. They knew all the motels on Anaheim Boulevard, knew where the New Yorkers stayed – who knew how to tip cab drivers – and how to avoid the non-tipping Europeans. Huay never considered himself a loner like a lot of cabbies. He was more like a hub, slowly creating a network of contacts, some of them the kind of people who often needed an anonymous, but trusted courier.

  And they got kickbacks themselves for delivering tourists and servicemen to massage parlors and topless clip joints. Whenever Huay started to feel guilty about this practice a fare would inevitably say something like “Are there a lot of Orientals out here?” Or “Are you a Chinese or a Japanese?” Even though it was the number one attraction at the time, the boat ride through the Small World ride at Disneyland seemed to have little effect on the larger world spinning around it.

  Not including people that ran away without paying their fares, Huay had only been robbed once. He’d g
iven the drunk, foul-breathed man thirty-three dollars in ones and then backed-over him as soon as he exited, crushing his legs with the taxi’s steel-belted radials. He had to rock the vehicle back and forth over him four times before the man stopped screaming. After that he vowed never to pick up another black man.

  The taxi partners worked three years without a break, a day off, or a vacation. All the time Huay’s safe-deposit box filling with untaxed cash.

  And then he made the deal that changed everything. Huay bought a driveway. A critical easement. A small piece of property that a corporation needed to complete a block-long hotel. The desk clerk owner giving him the tip before he retired to Kauai, a final “fuck you” to the developers who had squeezed him out. He knew what trouble it could cause, but had no fight left himself. The wool suits laughing when the cab drivers had looked at them and said, “One million dollars.” And then they had stopped laughing, called their headquarters and had Bank of America wire the funds.

  Huay’s new life began the moment the money arrived.

  It had made Huay see the world differently. With capital, he had power and leverage. He bought his first warehouse in Long Beach. He began sponsoring other cab drivers - invested in a Chinese restaurant, part of a Burger King franchise, a Dunkin Donuts. And he kept the taxi license, leasing it out for almost as much as he used to make driving.

  To complete his American dream, Huay married a beautiful princess in exile (or at least that’s what his wife’s parents had told her she was.) Distantly related to the Siranouks, Leath was working as a hostess at Bob’s Big Boy in Glendora (it was open twenty-four hours) when Huay met her. Just before the wedding, Huay received a second windfall when his taxi partner was killed in an accident. After two million miles on the road, his luck had run out. He became the very first fatality on the 605.

  And then after Dominique was born, Huay’s life fell into place like dominoes: a home, an office building, a cabin in the mountains, property in Nevada, vacations to Cannes, and all the time the warehouse space multiplying.

  And then seemingly just as fast, senseless violence came back into his life.

  A thirty-year old dishwasher with a bad attitude and impatient visions of grandeur was fired from one of the steam-table Chow Mein take-out places in which Huay was a partner. Fresh from the jungle, the man demanded compensation, calling and threatening the Mercedes-driving owners for his lost wages. Huay had simply refused to pay. He was used to resentment among immigrants and he always carried a gun in his car, but after the kind of killing he’d been involved in, he didn’t take threats in America that seriously.

  And then his wife had activated the claymore in the car meant for him. She was killed instantly. Shrapnel disintegrating his daughter’s foot -- Dominique only seven years old and already a sugar plum in the Orange County Ballet Theater’s version of the Nutcracker.

  After Dominique was stabilized, and Leath properly honored, Huay used his network to track the dishwasher. Initial rumors said that he had escaped back to Cambodia or was living in Burma, but a few hundred dollars in lubrication to the man’s boarding house roommates revealed that he had actually fled to St. Paul, Minnesota.

  Fortunately, Huay had local help in the land of 10,000 lakes. An old comrade who was making a mint in the frozen egg roll business picked him up at the airport, telling him that, officially, there were actually 14,601 Lakes. The immigration counselors suggested all the Southeast Asians memorize this factoid in order to show their Scandinavian hosts they were interested in Minnesota Culture. With the exception of Southern California, Minnesota had absorbed the most SE Asian immigrants from the Vietnam conflict, including thirty-percent of the Hmong tribesman who had fought alongside the U.S. Army on the Laotian border. Seeing a map, many of the immigrants were excited to learn they would be living so close to America’s biggest river. But the Mississippi was worthless and barren compared to the Tonle Sap or Mekong - particularly when it passed between the Twin Cities. Frozen for six months out of the year, deceptively dangerous and swift below the ice, then polluted and filled with barges and carp in the summer. The only abundant food resource the river supplied was deer, which could be found along the banks anytime one wanted, although the official hunting season was only two weeks long.

  It had been winter when Huay cornered the man in an unfinished basement in the neighborhood they called Frog Town. With his teeth chattering as hard as the condemned man’s at the end of his gun, Huay (with the help of two old friends), gave the arrogant dishwasher what the Khmer Rouge called the Dragon Treatment -- pouring gasoline down his throat and setting him on fire. As a group intimidation method it was highly effective, the victim died a spectacularly ghastly death, gasping for air from lungs that were no longer there. The unheated basement had filled with steam so thick that the executioners lost sight of each other, almost as if a real dragon had been slain.

  They wrapped the body in Glad bags and drove it in a covered pick-up truck out onto the ice of Lake Minnetonka. Many SE Asians had embraced ice-fishing because the daily limits were rarely checked by game wardens. They even clustered together in their own neighborhood on the frozen lake. Inside the privacy of the egg roll baron’s warming hut, they cut a fresh hole in the ice with a power auger and wrapped fishing anchors around the dead man’s neck and torso. They then stuffed the corpse headfirst into the slippery orifice, the egg-roll man assuring him that hungry snapping turtles would take care of the body in the spring. Huay could still picture the dishwasher’s Ostrich-skin boots disappearing down the ice-hole. He believed he could be a cowboy too.

  Huay’s own body had never been exposed to such temperatures. After the experience, he couldn’t understand how Europeans imagined Hell as a hot place. The cold was much, much worse.

  It was on the flight back, after a two-hour layover in Denver, that Huay realized how the claymore tactic could be improved on. And the first lines of his plan began to be drawn.

  Being alone in the car at such an early hour had taken Huay back to his early history in the Southland. But now he snapped himself back to the present. The past was still dead and could not help him.

  Huay sighed, the sun was coming up on a new day. He opened the door, turned ninety degrees, and emptied the sand out of his sneakers.

  HIGHWAY 1 – 9:30 AM

  After the mosquito incident, Lane couldn’t go back to sleep. Restless, he had declined Alan’s invitation to the funeral and had instead decided to head out to Zuma Beach to examine the crime scene. He thought it might help him to imagine how the mines were planted. He wore his new polo shirt and jeans as well as the clip-on FBI visitor badge that Alan had given him, just in case anyone wondered about the gun in his shoulder holster.

  Driving his rented Ford Explorer on the 101 (and then west on Topanga) Lane couldn’t believe the obsession with traffic reports on AM radio. Every six minutes, another report of misfortune: over-turned vehicle, injury-accident, spilled car batteries, tires in the number two lane. A red-tailed hawk, electrocuted by a power line in the hills above Santa Clarita, had started a ten-thousand acre fire, still only sixty-percent contained.

  Lane wondered if he should look into renting a motorcycle. He’d owned a British Indian in Africa, where, like running water, it was always faster to circumvent the obstacles.

  He switched to a college station, KPEP, Pepperdine University. It was music he’d never heard before, and for that reason, acceptable.

  Even at this early hour the beach parking lot was filling up. Lane looked out on the Malibu sand with his new binoculars. Pelicans flew in tight formation over the surf line. Life Guard Station #5 was closed. A few ribbons were stuck to it. The rest of the towers flew their American flags at half-mast.

  Lane stepped out onto the sand. Gray gulls and needle-nosed sand pipers scurried over the fresh tire tracks of the lifeguard’s Nissan truck. Lane walked past the garbage receptacles painted to look like gigantic Mountain Dew and Sunkist cans and then stopped to read the posted beach rules:


  No alcohol

  No pets

  No littering

  No glass

  No smoking

  No motorized vehicles

  No fireworks

  No kite flying

  No parking after 10 p.m.

  No parking before 7 am.

  Lane was thinking that with the weight of the mines, it must have taken multiple trips from a vehicle. But then he saw a woman nimbly dragging a cooler with training wheels across the sand. He’d never seen a cooler with wheels before, but he figured you could weigh one down pretty heavy. Lane imagined the perpetrator must have planted them the night before. Either parking on the shoulder of PCH and sneaking in after 10 p.m., or burying them in the evening, when the crowd was mostly gone. It was dark after 9:00 p.m. and he was sure the lifeguards went home much earlier than that.