A Crack in the Sea

by H. M. Bouwman

  Next to him, on the other side from Sang, the bushes swished. The quiet snapped momentarily: a low grown-up cough and a lighter sniff. Uncle Truc’s older brother and the other kid—the brother’s orphan neighbor—must have arrived. Uncle Truc’s brother, though the elder, was shorter than Uncle Truc and stockier. The neighbor boy was taller than Thanh by several centimeters and had an almost-shaved head, his hair just a little longer and fuzzier-looking than a crew cut. In the darkness they nodded in greeting.

  Everyone was there. It was time to go.

  • • •

  UNCLE TRUC’S BROTHER led them away from the village and to a secluded inlet where he had stored his boat. When they reached it, though, Sang stopped short. Thanh, directly behind her, stumbled into her before righting himself. The line of people froze.

  “In this?” Sang murmured. “A rowboat?”

  Larger than a typical rowboat, and with a motor attached to the back end, but yes: basically, a rowboat, flat-bottomed, wide—big enough from side to side even for Uncle Truc to stretch out on his back and sleep with room to spare—maybe eight meters in length. The sides were tall enough that if people sat in the bottom, next to the food and the barrels of water and fuel, they would be (just barely) hidden from view on shore. The craft was big for its type—but for an ocean-going boat it was pathetic.

  It was not what Thanh had imagined, and he could tell from Sang’s rigid back that it wasn’t what she’d expected, either. A boat for escaping should be much larger, a real boat with a big motor and a cabin to protect them from the weather. Navigational equipment. A radio. Not something almost level with the water. This thing was hardly worthy to float on the bigger rivers of the Delta, much less on the ocean.

  Uncle Truc cleared his throat. “The engine is almost brand-new. And powerful. My brother installed it for this trip. He was lucky to get it. And we have a good tarp and poles and ties to make a tent and keep out the weather.”

  “Also,” said the crew-cut boy, “Uncle Hung and I packed a lot of extra fuel and water and food this morning. This ship will do fine.” His matter-of-fact voice sounded proud of the feeble boat.

  “I see,” said Sang. She didn’t move forward.

  “She’s like me.” Uncle Truc’s brother spoke in his gruff voice. “Small and ugly but very, very strong.” He flexed in an exaggerated imitation of a bodybuilder, then straightened, stone-faced except for one quick wink at Thanh.

  And how much choice did they have? Without the money for the huge transport fees, this was their only chance to escape—maybe ever—and they knew it. Sang took a deep breath and climbed aboard. Thanh followed.

  Thanh and Sang’s father and Uncle Truc grew up in the same village, good friends; but when Uncle Truc had married and moved away to join his wife’s family, they’d lost contact. During the war, Thanh’s father had been an officer and a pilot for the Vietnamese air force, while Truc had been a soldier in the army. When the war ended—with both men on the losing side, and the American allies leaving them to their fates—their lives had slowly come together again. Uncle Truc had been briefly arrested. He returned to his home, facing a lifetime of surveillance, no good-paying work, and little hope for his children to do better—but at least he was alive.

  Thanh and Sang’s father, meanwhile, had frantically forged new identity papers for himself and moved his family to his wife’s village to disappear—or try to. Wonderfully, when they arrived at the village, there was Uncle Truc, just returned from prison camp. Still a true friend, Truc invited them to live in a little house behind his family.

  Soon after the move, Thanh and Sang’s mom had sickened and died. Their father had been found and arrested less than a year later, sent away to a prison camp from which he never returned.

  When Uncle Truc had finally, earlier this year, tracked down someone from their father’s prison camp and confirmed that he had died there, he talked to Sang for a long time, trying (as he did periodically) to persuade her to move in with his family. “I respected your father greatly. And I promised him that if he got arrested, I would take care of his family. I mean to keep my word.”

  “I’m sixteen,” said Sang, looking up from her sewing. “I take care of us.” Her face was tired, circles under her eyes.

  “But I’ll help,” said Uncle Truc. “And I’ll help you get out of here.”

  Uncle Truc’s plan was that he’d save up money and eventually he’d buy passage for them all on a boat, one big enough to make it down through the Mekong Delta and out into the ocean and, with luck, transport them all the way to a refugee camp in Malaysia or Thailand. It would take time, but they would escape someday, when they’d carefully planned it all out and bought all the correct supplies and found a good safe boat and a skilled captain.

  But there was never any money, and day after day, no work. Because he’d fought against the government, he had to keep checking in with the local police—the guerillas, as they were called—to report his activities, especially after a pilot was discovered hiding in a house practically in his backyard. (They’d had a lot of questions about that.) He looked more desperate with each passing week.

  So when Uncle Truc came to them early that morning and told them they’d leave today—even without money to pay their way—Thanh wasn’t wholly surprised. Long before breakfast, long before daylight, Uncle Truc entered their house, closing the door carefully behind him and not saying hello. “My older brother—the one who sells fruit up and down the Mekong? He says he can get us out. Tonight.” His lean face twisted a little. “I can’t take it here even one more day.”

  Sang nodded, glancing at the window. No one was there. Thanh sat down.

  “We’re taking his riverboat. We figure there’s just room for five.” He held up his fingers to count off the people. “Me and my brother Hung. And Hung’s neighbor kid—an orphan like you two, who won’t get out any other way—is coming as Hung’s adopted nephew. And The Turtle.” His face creased as he thought of his little daughter. “When she was born, the doctor said if she had surgery she might be able to walk someday. Wherever we end up, maybe she can get her foot fixed. And if not, she’ll get better treatment than here.”

  Sang crushed mung beans into a powder, making xoi vo—she’d had the idea that Thanh could sell the food in the village later in the day. Another small business to add to her income. “That’s smart to bring the baby.”

  “Your wife and the other kids?” Thanh said.

  “They’ll stay here, and I’ll send for them when I’m settled somewhere. My new country will surely let me bring my family over.” He paused. “It’s a really dangerous trip.”

  Sang checked the steaming rice. And still Uncle Truc didn’t say all of what he’d come to say.

  “That makes four,” said Thanh. His stomach felt all twisted up. “That’s four people on the boat. Out of five.”

  “Yes,” said Uncle Truc slowly. “There’s room for Sang. Then when she’s settled, she can send for you. Safer now for you to stay with my wife and our other kids and wait.” No one spoke for a moment; Thanh watched Sang to see what she would say, but she only picked up the pestle again, her hand hovering over the beans.

  Finally Uncle Truc cleared his throat. “We could take both of you, since The Turtle’s small. But it’ll be extremely crowded. And risky. What do you think?”

  “Both,” said Sang, once again mashing mung beans. “I’m in charge of him. We stay together.” And Thanh’s stomach untwisted.

  • • •

  AFTER UNCLE TRUC left, Sang said, “You know we can’t take the books.” Her voice was flat. She didn’t want Thanh to argue.

  He nodded, but as he ate leftover rice for breakfast, his eyes strayed to the small stack—the little hardcovers about planes and flying, the paperback English-Vietnamese dictionary—that their father had brought back from his brief pilot’s training in America. Anxious to learn English,
Thanh read in these books every day and thumbed through the dictionary each night before bed. He loved the books more than anything else they owned. And they were all Thanh and Sang had left of their father. But Sang was right. They weren’t practical to bring on a voyage.

  Sang sat next to Thanh as he ate, and she sewed their father’s wedding ring—which he’d given her for safekeeping long ago—into the hem of Thanh’s shirt. Then she sewed their mother’s ring into her own hem, and pulled their mother’s silver Buddha necklace over her head, tucking it inside her shirt. She told Thanh to work in the neighbor’s rice field as usual and to try to act as normal as possible. No one could know they were escaping. “Don’t daydream. And don’t go telling people any stories about what we’re going to do.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said, stung. Still, to make sure he kept quiet, he decided not to talk to anyone today. “Am I going to sell the xoi vo?”

  She shook her head. “We’ll eat it before we go.”

  Which was exciting—he hadn’t had such a treat in a long time—and somehow made the idea of going to sea less scary and more like a good story. At least for the moment.

  As Thanh left that morning, Sang was beginning her sewing. Her plan was to finish the dress, bring it to her client, buy a bag of rice, and maybe even have a little money left over. His job, she told him, was to return home when he finished work, collect the cooking pot with their extra clothes, the good knife, and the xoi vo, fill the pot the rest of the way with some pomelos from their backyard tree, and at dusk, bring the pot and its contents to the reeds where she would meet him.

  All day, he worked in the rice field, trying to act normal. But what was normal? The ring made a lump in the hem near his hip that he could feel every time his hand brushed against it. By lunchtime he’d irrigated the wrong fields twice, and even he couldn’t think of a story to explain where his brain had been—except the truth, which he bit his tongue back from telling. The farmer he worked for sent him home in disgust.

  But he couldn’t go home—he couldn’t tell Sang that on his last day in Vietnam he’d gotten fired from his job. So he took his lunch and walked slowly off. His feet decided where to go without his thinking about it, and soon he arrived in the cemetery outside the village. By then he had a thrilling story running through his head, not about his failure as a buffalo boy, but about what their trip and their new life might be like. He sat near his mother’s grave and told the story, knowing she would have loved it.

  He hadn’t fallen asleep—he hadn’t—but he had lost track of time, and when he looked around him, it was late and the sun was rapidly declining in the sky. He’d run all the way to the meeting spot, staying carefully out of sight of the road and the villagers and the village guerillas.

  But of course he’d forgotten the clothing, pot, food, and knife. And of course, Sang had gotten mad—and then forgiven him.

  Now they all hunched on the floor of the flat-bottomed boat, except Uncle Truc and his brother, who rowed. They didn’t have permission to leave the country, and if caught they faced harsh consequences—prison at best. The boat slipped silently down the river. Too dangerous to use the noisy engine until they were closer to sea.

  The other boy, the adopted nephew, tied everything securely to the boat before he stretched out to rest. The Turtle, groggily waking, sucked her thumb, leaning against Sang. Sang put her arm around Thanh’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Cu Ty,” she whispered, calling him by the nickname their mom had given him when he was a baby. “Uncle Truc has a pot and a knife we can use. And even without today’s sewing money, I was still able to buy some rice. I should have taken care of the clothes myself, not asked you to do it. I’m four years older, after all. I’m in charge.” She echoed what their mother had said to them just before she died: If anything happens to me or your father, Sang is in charge.

  Sang’s words were kind, but a thread of unhappiness wove through her voice. Thanh knew what she was thinking: that she should be able to trust her brother with simple jobs. He was already twelve. There were a lot of kids his age living on their own, taking care of their little brothers and sisters, earning a living. He was glad she wasn’t mad, but he cringed at what she must think of him. “No sewing money?”

  “It was so frustrating,” she whispered. “The woman said she didn’t have the money to pay me today, and I should stop by tomorrow for it. She even said she’d give me extra dong for the hassle.” Thanh could hear her voice smile into the darkness. “Well, what could I do? Say ‘No, that isn’t convenient for me, since I’m running away tonight’? So we’ll never see that money, and I might as well have saved my time on the last-minute sewing. What did you do today after you finished working?”

  “I said good-bye. At the graveyard. I brought wildflowers there.” He’d left them on their grandparents’ graves. He’d had that long talk, too, with their mother’s gravestone. Thanh had made up a story about how happy they were going to be when they got to America. But he didn’t mention that to Sang. It had made him late. And it sounded weird.

  Sang was silent for a moment. Then she sighed. “Well, I guess I’m glad. Mom would want us to go, you know that.”

  Thanh nodded. Mom. Hidden on the bottom of the flat boat while the two men steered silently down the river, he wondered if their mother, somewhere, was worried about them. But before he could drift into a daydream, Uncle Truc’s brother grunted. “Quiet. Someone on shore.”

  “They’ll think we’re just fishermen,” said Uncle Truc, but he, too, froze.

  The baby, who’d been silent as a ghost up to that point, whined. Sang patted her back and whispered to her. Uncle Truc opened a small bottle and handed it to Sang, who gave The Turtle a couple of drops.

  “Everyone quiet,” said Uncle Truc’s brother again. “Not a sound.” His own words were barely audible. Their boat, unlit and silent, slid down the dark river. Thanh was glad the moon was only a sliver.

  Voices mingled on shore, overlapping and impossible to decipher, and then, suddenly, a shout: “Hey there! Stop or we shoot! Stop!”

  The Turtle whined again. Sang covered her mouth and hugged her close.

  Uncle Truc whispered, “Are we in range?”

  Uncle Truc’s brother swung an oar. “Let’s go,” he said. “This is it.” He started paddling, strong fast strokes. Uncle Truc reached back to start the motor.

  But before Uncle Truc could pull the engine’s start, the night was punctured with popping, dozens and dozens of pop-pop-pop-pops. Then moaning. Several voices at the same time.

  Thanh had heard that noise—both the pop and the moaning—many times. He knew exactly what it meant. People had been shot. He looked around. Not him, not Sang, not anyone in the bottom of the boat. Above him sat the lopsided silhouette of Uncle Truc, hand on the not-yet-pulled engine cord. Uncle Truc wasn’t shot either. Thanh lifted his head a few centimeters, just enough to see Uncle Truc’s shadowed brother. Not shot. He sat as still as the small statue of some unknown hero that stood in the corner of Thanh’s old schoolroom. But somewhere nearby, people were crying.

  Thanh looked up at Uncle Truc again, motionless at the engine. Uncle Truc unthawed and drew his hand slowly away from the engine cord as if it were a coiled snake. Thanh peeked over the edge of the boat even as Sang reached up to pull him back down. Behind them on the river, about a quarter mile back, another boat, much larger than theirs, an actually seaworthy vessel with a real cabin, floated white against the black water. The boat groaned.

  On shore a big engine growled to life. Uncle Truc nodded to his brother, and they dipped their oars quietly and paddled toward a brushy island—really a sandbar and a downed tree and all the brush that had come to rest on it—away from the spotlight that the police boat was sure to bring. They left the white boat behind, still moaning, and they hid in the brush while the police arrived, towed the other boat to shore, and arrested the people on board, the offi
cers crowing about how many they’d managed to snag at one time—forty of them still alive, and a nice stash of gold, too.

  As they held their breaths at the island, Uncle Truc and his brother crouched with everyone else in the bottom of the boat, so that no one’s eyes or clothes would catch the police boat’s searchlight as it flicked around the river.

  Thanh peeked over the side again, anxious for a glimpse of what was going on, and Sang and Uncle Truc both reached up and yanked him back into the bottom of the boat. The pull on his shirt made him choke, and he fought to keep his cough from making noise.

  The other boy, the adopted nephew, watched, his crew-cut hair dark and fuzzy against the lighter wood of the boat. Suddenly his teeth flashed in the dark as he grinned. “Kind of a knucklehead, aren’t you?” he asked in a soft voice. “Try not to get us killed.”

  • • •

  GETTING OUT of the Mekong Delta was hard work and took more fuel than Uncle Truc’s brother had calculated for; the tide washing into the delta was much stronger than he’d realized it would be. But they reached the big waters of the South China Sea the next afternoon, without getting caught or overturned by waves, and they still had just enough fuel to make it to Malaysia, as long as they weren’t delayed by anything.

  Maybe three more days, said Uncle Truc, shoulder slumping more than usual, as he studied his hand-drawn map. He didn’t sound too sure.

  The waves on the South China Sea were bigger than any Thanh had ever seen; they reminded him of a Japanese print that had hung on a wall at the village school he’d attended before his father’s arrest. (The picture lurked behind the statue—and was much better than the nameless hero at provoking daydreams.) The print showed a little boat rowing up a giant wave, Mount Fuji in the background. As he sat in school day after day, failing test after test, Thanh gazed at the little boat, wondering why it was out in the storm, and if the tiny men inside were terrified—or maybe they were tough and not afraid of anything? He’d daydreamed until one day, he was asked to read aloud and had to admit he didn’t know what book they were reading. “But I can tell you about the men on that boat, lost at sea. They’re having a pretty bad day, and it’s about to get worse.” His classmates giggled and, before he could launch into a full-fledged story, the teacher told him to pay attention—and took the picture down, facing it toward the wall.