by Vu Tran
I turned on a small lamp by the wall and another one next to the couch, which flushed the room with a warm light that did not quite reach the high ceilings or the darkness of the open rooms behind Sonny, but it was enough to get my bearings.
Their house was furnished with all the fancy stuff required of a wealthy, middle-aged couple: the big-screen TV, the lavish stereo system, the large aquarium by the foot of the staircase. It was hard not to notice the tall wooden crucifix above the fireplace and the vases on every table, filled with snapdragons and spider mums, oriental lilies, bluebells and gladioli. I had learned all their names over the years.
Rain was drumming the roof above us. I must have been a sight to him: pale and hooded, one hand swathed in bandages and the other wielding a gun, a stranger dripping water onto his wife’s pristine white carpet. She used to yell at me just for wearing shoes in the house.
I caught a whiff of shrimp paste in the air, that nostalgic smell I would forever link to the Vietnamese.
“What you want?” He spoke in a quiet but strained voice. “You want money, my wallet right there.”
He nodded at the table beside me, where his wallet lay by the telephone and some car keys. Behind the phone stood a photo of him and Suzy on a beach, in front of waters bluer than I’d ever swum.
“I got no other money in the house.”
His was a voice that liked being loud, that liked dancing around its listener. I could tell it took him some effort not to fling his words at me.
With the free thumb of my injured hand, I managed to pull the receiver off the phone and leave it face up on the table. “Anyone else in the house?”
“Nobody here.”
“Nobody? Your wife—where’s she?”
I could see him about to shake his head, like he was ready to deny having a wife, before he realized that he had all but pointed out the photo.
“She not here. She sleep at her mother house tonight. Just me.”
“I see two cars in the driveway.”
“What do that matter? I tell you it just me here tonight.”
“So if I make you take me upstairs, I won’t find anyone there?”
He looked stumped, like I had tricked him. He glanced, as if for answers, at the giant crucifix above the fireplace before returning his outrage on me. “I tell you nobody here,” he growled. “Take my wallet. My car. Take what you want and go.”
I kept my gun trained on him and walked over to the fireplace. Sure enough, on the mantelpiece, by a rosary and some candles, lay Suzy’s red journal. I wondered if Sonny understood or even cared about its contents. The crucifix peered down at us, a contortion of dark anguish on the wall. I tucked the journal into my back pocket.
Sonny’s eyes narrowed and he lowered his hands a bit. In the dim light, his shaved head made him look like some ghoulish monk. From the open door, I could hear rain slapping concrete, a violent sound.
“Tell you what,” I said, “I’m gonna let you go. Walk out the front door. Call for help if you want.”
He threw me a baffled scowl.
“Go on. If no one’s here, then you have nothing to worry about.”
Now his hands fell. “What this shit, man? Who are you?”
I took a step toward him, and he slowly raised his hands again without adjusting his glare on me.
“Last chance,” I said.
“I’m not go anywhere, man.”
There was a calm now in the flimsy way he held up his hands, like I was an annoying child with a toy gun. He was ready to fight to the death. He didn’t know, though, that he’d already won. He’d passed the test. Except how many more times would he save her like tonight? And what did that prove anyway?
I glanced up the stairs, at the dark hallway of doors at the top, wondering which room was their bedroom, which room might she be sleeping in, which door might she be standing behind right now, cupping her ear to the wood, holding her breath. A heaviness fell over me, like I no longer recognized that shrimp paste smell in the air or any of the outlandish flowers in this strange house—but I shook off the feeling.
I’d only glanced away for a second or two, but Sonny had already reached into the adjacent room and reappeared with a kitchen knife in his hand. He moved willfully, almost casually, and was coming at me like he either knew I wouldn’t shoot him or didn’t care if I did. I stumbled back a few steps, aiming at his chest, but I bumped hard into something and lost my balance, tumbling backward onto the coffee table, which met my back with a crashing thud.
He lunged on top of me, a rock of a man, and I managed somehow to grab his wrist in the crook of my bad hand, holding off the knife as best I could, but his other hand had seized my right wrist, his fingers digging into the bone so hard I thought it would snap and I lost my grip on the gun and it fell to the floor. He was dumb strong but I was still bigger, and growling through my teeth I heaved him off me and he pulled me with him onto the carpet. In our struggle I was able to get enough space between us to knee him in the groin, which knocked the breath out of him and freed my good hand. A glass ashtray from the table lay overturned on the carpet and I grabbed it and struck him across the temple. He grunted and still clawed at my arm, so I struck him a second time and was about to bring down the ashtray again. But he’d gone limp.
My lips were trembling, my mouth dry as I swallowed that animal urge to crush his head. I snatched the knife from his hand and tossed it across the room.
I got up, backed away. I found my gun on the floor and trained it again on him. For a second, I thought he might be dead. In my fingers, I could still feel the thud of the ashtray on his skull. But he moved a little now, holding the side of his face with one hand.
Part of me was ready to shoot him while the rest of me rummaged through the consequences of walking away. I glanced at the dark staircase and nearly expected Suzy to be standing there, gazing down at me with horror. I hooded myself.
Sonny had raised himself on an elbow. He watched me slink toward the front door, ignoring the blood crawling down the side of his face, his eyes brimming with some unspoken promise. Behind him, in the aquarium, a pair of football-size fish were writhing around in the black water as though awakened by our violence.
I ran out into the rain, stumbling across the gushing lawn and through the surging water in the street to my car. My engine whined to life. As I sped past the house, I glimpsed Sonny standing on their front porch with his fists clenched at his side. I could have sworn a slimmer figure lurked behind him in the dark doorway.
I careened down the slick Vegas streets like an ambulance and passed cars one by one, my windshield wipers yelping back and forth. Only after I’d driven a few miles did I slow down. I turned on the radio. I reentered the highway. My body felt cool, and the rain was soothing on the roof of the car.
My bandaged hand, a claw now, began throbbing again. I looked at it several times like it was some talisman, amazed that I’d been able to use it. Then I remembered Suzy’s red journal in my back pocket and managed to pull it out. Cradled there in my lap, it too seemed miraculous and inexplicably precious. Stolen treasure with no value.
The Strip receded in the distance, a towering shining island in the night. I turned off the radio and let the rain drum in my ears. The night was a tunnel. I drove a steady clip down the highway and thought of nothing and everything all at once.
3
THE KID HELD THE GUN inches from my head, its proximity like a brace on my neck so that I could only stare straight ahead and lock eyes with his partner. They seemed disarmingly calm, my two intruders—and thoughtful, like they had heard what Sonny had said and were now, like their boss, waiting for my response.
When I was six, I watched my father grab my brown terrier by the collar and slam it headfirst against our porch wall. It had pissed on his shoe—this, after a month of him warning me of its messes around the house. It instantly went limp and he held it up and looked at it and walked to our curbside trash can. Hours later we heard scratching at our
front door, and there it was, limping sleepily around the welcome mat. I remember the shiver that coursed through me when I saw its small head bobbing in the doorway, the same shiver I felt now as Sonny uttered Suzy’s name. I realized that in the last five months, as I tried my best to close every door that led to Las Vegas, I’d been waiting all along to hear bad news about her.
I swallowed to keep my voice steady. “What do you mean, where is she?”
“I ask you. Four days now she been gone. She just disappear?”
He said “disappear”the way an adult would say it to a wide-eyed child. Poof! In a puff of smoke!
“Wait,” I said. “You think I know where she went, or you think I took her? I haven’t heard from her since she left Oakland two years ago. Since she left me.”
“But you come here to Vegas, right?”
“Look, I heard you hurt her and I had to do something. It was stupid and you can come at me with what you think I deserve. But whatever this is with Suzy, I don’t know anything about it. I told you—I haven’t said a word to her in over two years.”
“How I know you not lie to me, huh?”
“I got no reason to. I know you think I do, but she left me, man. A long time ago.”
I heard ice cubes clinking in a glass, like him finishing off the last of a drink, like he was beginning to believe me.
“Sonny, can you please tell your boy here to point his gun at something else?” I could hear the kid breathing through his nose.
“Don’t call me fucking Sonny. Give the phone to him.”
“He said to give you the phone.”
The kid snatched it out of my hand, said “Yes” in Vietnamese a couple of times, then backed away from me. I had to blink several times, breathe out, like the gun had been a hood over my face.
He handed the phone to his partner, who listened intently without saying a word. A minute later he hung up.
“We’re leaving. You’re coming with us to Las Vegas.”
“What for?”
He slipped on a pair of black leather gloves, then turned away all of a sudden, seized by hacking coughs. He recovered himself, wiping his mouth with renewed calm. “Your clothes. Change them.”
The kid was kneeling on the floor, tying his shoelaces with his gun on the carpet beside him. He peered around my apartment, then up at me. “This a sad place, man. Not even a Christmas tree?”
IT WAS DARK by the time we got on the 580 going south, toward Vegas. As I sat in the backseat of a morbidly tinted Lexus with the kid beside me and his partner driving in front, I felt more a guest than a captive. No guns pointed at me, my hands free, the car doors unlocked. It was like I had asked them for a ride. Their remaining gesture at seriousness was their silence, though the kid was soon singing under his breath, tapping his fingers to some beat in his head.
It dawned on me that I’d been spared for the last five months—that Sonny had known all along who I was and where I lived and for some reason had decided to do nothing, because whatever this was now, whatever he was planning for me, it didn’t smell of him settling a score. What actually troubled me was that he was dangling Suzy over my head, certain that I’d be desperate to find out what happened to her, that if my escorts had stopped the car and let me out, I would have climbed right back in.
Around midnight, we stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through by the highway. For the first time since we left, the quiet one spoke, regarding me in the rearview mirror. “You eat meat?”
I watched him order for us, the way he passed the kid his food without asking him what he wanted.
“You’re all brothers, aren’t you?” I asked the kid.
He stopped smacking his food and checked for a reaction from his partner up front.
“You old enough to drink?” I continued.
“Hey, man, I’ll be twenty-three in December.”
“And he’s the oldest, right? What, twenty-five?”
He looked away, chuckling like he didn’t care, and stuffed his mouth with some fries. In the rearview mirror, his brother was ignoring us, driving and chewing his food evenly.
“Behind us,” I said, gesturing at the third brother trailing us in my Chrysler, the one who had handed me the note in the parking lot. “He’s younger than you both. Looks like he got his driver’s license last week.”
The kid made a face. “Come on, man, we don’t look that much alike.”
“You don’t need to. I can still tell.”
He tried to suss out my meaning, his grin a defensive one now. He couldn’t see what I saw: the older brother’s authority, unquestioned, almost paternal. It was a right of kinship wielded by Asian siblings, whether they looked alike or not—a right I would have envied had I a brother or sister.
Hours later, as we traveled deep into the night, I was watching him sleep when he opened his eyes, like he’d only been meditating, and stared at the back of his brother’s head.
I noticed something in his hand. Before we left my apartment in Oakland, they had me call the station and leave a message for my sergeant, explaining only that I would be out of town indefinitely for a family emergency. Then they made me pack a small duffel bag and change into civilian clothing. Before we left, they took one of my credit cards and also my badge, which I could now see in the kid’s palm. He was caressing it slowly with his thumb.
He peered at me. “How many people’ve you killed, Mr. Officer?”
“I’ve lost count.”
“Come on, you ain’t young. How you be a cop in Oakland for so long and not kill nobody?”
“We don’t kill people. We defend ourselves when necessary and sometimes people die. It’s part of the job. It’s not exactly intentional.”
“Man, it’s intentional if you killing them before they kill you.”
“All right. If that’s how you want to see it.”
“So come on, how many you shot. How many you killed?”
“I’ve never killed anyone. You look disappointed.”
“No one, huh? But I bet you wanted some of them bitches to die, right?”
There was a vulgar sincerity in the way he kept nodding at me as though, despite the difference between us in age and profession, we shared some secret affinity because of the hardware we carried.
“Sure, I wanted a few assholes to not make it. Do I have to give you a number? Tell me yours.”
He looked up as if sifting through his memory. “Shit, I—”
His brother snapped at him in Vietnamese, three or four clipped words and a glare in the rearview mirror, his sudden scowl as startling as his tone. The kid fell silent and sheepishly turned to the window.
The brother glanced at me before returning his eyes to the road, as if returning to a reverie, as if the night saddened him.
IT WAS DAYLIGHT when I awoke, with the kid driving now and the brother seated next to me, facing the window. His coughing had awoken me, but the car was coasting in funereal silence. I sat up and saw that we’d arrived in Vegas, crawling along I-15 in early-morning traffic. Still following us, nearly riding our rear bumper, was the youngest brother in my Chrysler.
I yawned, and this time it was the kid glancing back in the rearview mirror.
I said, “Your baby brother been driving all night long?”
“Don’t worry, he’s a fucking vampire. He doesn’t sleep till the sun’s out. We drop you off, and his ass is going to bed.”
“And where are you dropping me off?”
“You think I know?”
Next to me, the eldest brother lit a cigarette and massaged his cropped hair as he gazed out the window, cut off in his own quiet like he was the only person in the car. I could tell that he rarely concerned himself with any of his brother’s white noise. He rolled down his window halfway and ushered in the buzz of traffic and a frigid morning breeze. It had slipped my mind that winter comes to the desert. I put on the rumpled jacket I had used as a pillow. The car was so darkly tinted that the white light from his open window looked alien
to my bleary eyes, the color of emptiness.
I asked him for a cigarette and he obliged, lighting it for me without a word, without meeting my eye. The quiet ones do this. They exert control by giving nothing out, and it’s this blankness that makes them unpredictable, as dangerous as the loud ones are obvious. But this kid’s silence also made him somehow genuine. The one person so far who wasn’t trying.
I opened my window and zipped up my jacket, blew smoke into the harsh light. The one time I’d smoked since Suzy left was that last time here with Sonny Jr. But it soothed me now, as it used to in the morning, back when I’d smoke a pack and a half a day, starting with the one I’d put to my lips the moment I got out of bed: before I brushed my teeth or even looked at myself in the mirror, standing by the bedroom window and slowly waking myself in the sunlight, amid the drifting curling smoke, those five minutes like a silent prayer to prepare myself for whatever the day might bring. Suzy sometimes joined me by the window. We’d share the cigarette.
I realized now why I had quit. It wasn’t to get healthy. And it was only partially to rid myself of the nostalgia for my old habits with her. I was at work the day she left the house; she took all her clothes and only the possessions she had acquired before we met, which amounted to some Vietnamese music cassettes, a few books, and a collection of small framed watercolor paintings of Vietnam landscapes. And of course the red journal. Everything else remained: our furniture, the jewelry I’d bought her, all our photographs together, framed and unframed. I came home that evening to a fully furnished house that felt as empty as her half of the bedroom closet. To my surprise, her crucifixes still hung on the walls and her porcelain figurines—the various Jesuses and Virgin Marys and Saints this and that—still peopled the shelves, as if in knowing my resistance to religion she had purposefully left God’s presence to save me. Or mock me. I found myself sinking into the sofa and not quite believing that she’d actually gone through with it, abandoned me. I remember smoking a cigarette on the front porch that night, watching the fog amble in from the bay, and deciding that after a carton a week for three decades—since I was fourteen, for God’s sake—that cigarette would be my last one. I was quitting not because I wanted or needed to, and definitely not because I thought it would be easy. I was quitting to punish myself.
