Dragonfish: A Novel

by Vu Tran

  By the time I found Happy’s house, I couldn’t feel my face or my fingers and had to brush snow out of my hair. Several cars were parked along the curb across the street, covered in a thin layer of snow, none of them familiar. Her side of the street was empty, as was her driveway, her car probably parked in the garage. The blinds on all her windows were closed too, but the lights in one were on. I rechecked the address above the garage. Even as I approached the front door, I kept wondering if I had the wrong half of the duplex.

  I knocked and waited, then knocked again. I thought about calling out her name, but all the houses on the block were close together, and even my knocking had sounded too loud.

  I tried the knob and it turned and the door opened. I spoke into the doorway, “Happy? Are you there?”

  On the wall of the dark entryway, a painting of a young Vietnamese woman in a yellow áo dài smiled at me. She was holding her rice hat against her belly, her long black hair falling over her shoulder. Beside the painting stood a coat rack that held Happy’s black peacoat.

  I stepped into the entryway and could see part of the living room around the corner and the illuminated red lampshade that ruddied the shadows.

  “Happy?” I called out again, my annoyance growing now that I was sure I had the right place. “It’s Robert. I’m coming in.”

  I closed the front door and approached the living room. Turning the corner, I saw lit candles on the kitchen counter, then an ivory couch across the way with something long and black draped over its back. Another coat. Beyond the couch was an unlit hallway that led to four closed doors.

  When I stepped onto the cream carpet, my wet shoes stained it, so I bent down to untie my laces, and it was only then that I noticed the darker shoeprints ahead of me.

  I pulled out my gun and stepped farther into the living room. To my far left, sitting in an armchair beside an unlit Christmas tree, was Sonny.

  His head was reclined on the seatback, his dull eyes narrowed on me. He seemed unsurprised by my presence and uninterested in the gun I had on him. His own he held limply, pointed at the floor. It was like my appearance had just awakened him from a deep nap. Beside him on the end table was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  “Set the gun on the floor,” I ordered him and moved behind the couch.

  He lifted his head. His face was flushed. Tiredly, he said, “This again, huh?”

  He was right, of course. Even the shadows gave me déjà vu. I’d spent the last twenty-four hours wishing I had shot him five months ago, and here I was back in the same spot, made impotent again by fear and curiosity.

  “Why are you here?” I said. “Where’s Happy?”

  “She not here no more. She gone.”

  “Gone where? Why?”

  He shook his head as though the questions were too stupid to answer.

  “I said drop the gun, Sonny. Did you hurt Happy? Where is she?”

  “Where my wife? Where my fucking money? You know that?”

  He came to life, wincing as he sat up and plunked his gun on the table and grabbed the pack of cigarettes lying there. He lit up and massaged his scalp with his other hand, then ran it roughly across his face like he was wiping off the exhaustion. His smoking hand, I noticed, was shaking slightly. He was an emotional drunk, unsurprisingly, liable to be at his most violent but also, I was hoping, his most sincere.

  “Suzy’s gone,” I said. “She’s left town for good. I don’t know where, but I know she’s not coming back. To me or to you.”

  “Suzy,” he muttered and shook his head. “You give her that name?”

  “Let’s bury it right here, Sonny. She’s gone, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Go on with your life. Let me go home and go on with mine.”

  “That it, huh? We just say bye-bye, huh?”

  “You brought me here to find her, but there’s nothing to find.”

  “My stupid son—that his idea. He don’t tell me nothing. He say he take care of everything, but he don’t get shit done. Look at you. What you do here now? You point the gun at me like this your house. I pay for this house! My son—it all his fucking idea! Me? I want bring you here and fuck you up, man.”

  His voice was rousing his body, his fists tightening with each word. I’d been holding on to some possibility of getting him out of the house so I could search for the letters, but my other con cern now was how to get myself out without one of us getting shot.

  The phone beside him rang, startling only me. After the third ring, Sonny lifted the receiver, killed the call, and left the receiver upturned on the end table beside his gun. The dial tone droned between us.

  “Who’re you ignoring, Sonny?”

  He dumped a couple of cigarettes onto the table for himself, then held out the pack. “Smoke with me.”

  When I didn’t move, he flung the pack peevishly at me and it landed on the carpet by my feet. “Smoke a fucking cigarette, huh?”

  “Why?”

  “We talk. Like man to man. You want go home, right?”

  I had only two choices now: shoot him or humor him. I reached down for the pack, keeping my gun trained on his heart, and shook a cigarette out onto my lips. I lit it with the candle on the kitchen counter behind me and took it in like a long drink.

  The phone had gone into its echoing off-hook tone like some distant siren. Sonny stole a swill of the Johnnie Walker and winced again. Then he relaxed, and a wry smile appeared on his face.

  “Nowadays, man, I love play poker with American. The old day I sit down at the table and they think I don’t know shit. They loud, they laugh, they think they run over me because I small, I talk funny. It don’t matter I have good game or bad game. They always think they better. But now, man, I talk louder, I laugh louder, make bigger joke, especially when I beat them, take all their money. I love when they don’t got nothing to say. It’s like I broke their dream, man. It’s like I take their money and their voice.”

  “Why’re you telling me this?”

  “You fight in the war? I fight with Americans in the war. They get drunk and piss in the street in front of my mother. They drive around and try to pull the pretty girl on their Jeep and laugh when the girl scream and run away. They wanna fuck all the Vietnamese girl, every one they see. Sometime, they fall in love too. One fucking GI, I remember he tall and so white he look like he sick. Always call us ‘slant-eye’ and ‘Marvin the motherfuckin’ ARVN.’ He make joke we not understand, pat us on our head like we little boy. You know what this guy do? He fall in love with a bar girl, man. He buy her all the gifts and promise he take her home and marry her. He so dumb he don’t know she just want go to America and take his money. So what happen? She find another GI who promise her better thing and she leave this guy. And he so fucking sad, he not talk to nobody for a whole week. Nothing. Then one day, he find the other GI in the street. He not say a word. He just walk up and stick his knife right here.”

  Sonny made a single stabbing gesture at his throat.

  “So I remind you of him.”

  “No, man. You not got the balls to do what he do. You the other GI, the one who die.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, Sonny.”

  “Shoot me then. I let you.” He picked up his gun by the barrel and tossed it on the couch in front of me. “Shoot me and you can go.” He made a finger gun and pointed it at his temple. “Shoot me!” he hissed through his teeth, his chin raised, his bloodshot eyes flaring at me.

  Just as quickly as it erupted, his temper vanished and he took another pull from the bottle.

  I reached for his gun and slipped it into my coat pocket. I looked around for something I could tie his hands and feet with, keep him drunk and immobile while I looked for the letters.

  “She never talk about you, man,” he said wearily.

  “All right, Sonny.”

  “No, she not talk about you ever, man. You know why?”

  “Shut up, Sonny.”

  “She feel sorry for you, man. She hate me, bu
t she feel sorry for you.”

  His tone stopped me. His bravado had given way to a hush of seriousness, like he was genuinely sad for me. He put the bottle again to his lips, then changed his mind and let it sink into his lap.

  Mai might have been right about him after all. I wanted to despise him wholeheartedly in that moment, but it was dawning on me that he not only loved Suzy, but might have loved her more than I ever did—with a depth, with layers, too many probably, that I’d always hoped for but was never truly capable of. Perhaps you need full reciprocity to feel it like he did. Perhaps you have to be willing to hurt and kill and suffer and die for it.

  I dropped my cigarette in a glass of water on the kitchen counter, unsatisfied by the hiss, and I wondered if Suzy had asked Sonny for my life also out of pity. There was, strangely, no real anger or envy in me—just the suspicion that I had lost this fight a long time ago, that actually the fight was never mine to win or lose.

  Sonny was peering at the fake fireplace with its fake logs and all the candles and picture frames cluttering Happy’s mantelpiece. I remembered those same pictures from her old place in Oakland and knew how much family she still had in Vietnam, how none of them had ever made it to America though some had tried. Sonny was looking them over like he knew that too.

  Then I spotted, atop those fake logs, the crumpled ashy remains of an envelope. I picked up what survived of the letter inside, a tiny scrap of paper with Suzy’s unmistakable handwriting in English, the end of two lines:

  never forget.

  first time I see

  Sonny’s heavy-lidded eyes were still pitying me.

  “Why did you do this?” I said. “This was mine.”

  “You not deserve it. Don’t worry, it just one page.”

  “You read it?”

  “You want know what she say? She say she appreciate what you do for her. She say she want remember you like the first day she see you. She say you a good man. She say she admire you.”

  “You’re making that shit up.”

  “I not lie, man. She lie, though. She want to make you feel better. That what I say, man—she feel sorry for you.”

  “Where are the other letters? Where the fuck are the other letters?”

  He had another cigarette in his mouth. Absently, as though sighing surrender, he said, “Happy not tell me that.” His hands shook slightly as the lighter lit up his face. That’s when I noticed the bright red scratch marks on his cheek.

  “Sonny—where’s Happy?”

  He was staring straight ahead, drowsily, as though waiting for sleep to overcome him.

  “Sonny. I called here an hour ago. I was just on the phone with her.”

  “I hear you all talk.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I hear every word she say to you.” His head rolled back onto the seatback and he closed his eyes.

  I backed into the hallway. With my gun still trained on him, I opened the first door and flicked on the light. It was the bathroom. I pulled back the shower curtain but the tub was empty.

  The adjacent door revealed a closet full of stacked shoe boxes and casino uniforms hung in dry-cleaning plastic.

  I threw open the third door. The darkness receded into the room: bedsheets pulled onto the floor, an overturned lamp, a whiff of shit. Even before I flipped the light switch, I could already make out the outline of her body, her thin forearm extended over the edge of the bed.

  She was still wearing her uniform, her bow tie twisted vertically like he had used that to strangle her, though I could see his purple thumb marks on her throat. Her body was warm, but her face was the color of concrete, her eyes hemorrhaged red and gaping at the ceiling. Her tongue stuck out, a dry slug on her bluish lips, like it was plugging her mouth, and in my mind her pained laugh on the phone became the sound of everything she had ever been to me.

  I finally noticed the kitchen knife, streaked with blood, lying on the carpet beneath her outstretched hand. I reached down for it, and it was then that I stepped on her glasses. They crunched beneath my feet.

  Sonny had not moved in his chair, his eyes open but looking at nothing. I finally saw the dark wet blotch on his outer thigh, staining the inside of the yellow chair brown.

  “I not want to do it,” he murmured and brought his cigarette to his lips.

  I slapped it out of his hand. He tried to speak but I swatted his face with the butt of my gun and he fell out of the chair and onto the carpet. He gasped and grabbed his thigh and I stomped on him twice there, on his hand and his wound, and when he screamed out I went down on one knee and slugged him, pummeling his skull, his face, my knuckles scraping his teeth. My hand recoiled and I had to catch my breath, and all my rage went to the pain in my torn hand.

  I shoved the gun’s muzzle against his temple. His face was half hidden in the crook of an arm, blood dripping from his mouth and onto his chin, crawling down his cheek from the gash above his eye.

  It wasn’t fear or hesitation that kept me from pulling the trigger this time. Just an animal need to hurt him much more while he was still alive to feel it.

  “You motherfucker!” I hissed, still on my knees.

  Then I saw the phone cord. I thrust my gun into my coat pocket and ripped the cord out of the phone. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

  But I felt his hand seize my leg, and then something hard clunked me on the side of the face. Everything erupted into a black, throbbing vacuum of silence. I came out of it lying on the floor and struggling to open my eyes and finally seeing a bright flare. In my hazy vision, the Christmas tree sprouted a fiery arm, and out of that nightmare came Sonny’s shadowy half-form, crawling toward me and raising his arm one last time to bring the bottle down on my head.

  I WAS UPSIDE DOWN, draped over someone’s shoulder. My arms dangled heavily. A thick hand gripped my thigh. The air was bitter cold and it was hard to breathe, my face thudding against some one’s broad backside. We were lumbering across wet, crunchy snow, and in the distance I heard somebody scream.

  THEN I WAS LYING in a darkness that droned and trembled. My legs were scrunched against a car door and I could see the highway lamps pass in the window, that sickly yellow light again, the snow still flying about like so many buzzing flies.

  The road beneath me felt like it was all around me.

  17

  THE FIRST THING I SAW when I awoke was the painting of the geisha climbing the staircase. It seemed to me she was floating up the stairs.

  I was lying on the leather couch in Sonny’s gloomy office, my shoes still on my feet, still slightly damp.

  “Can you sit up?” said a voice.

  Junior sat behind his father’s desk in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled. He looked even younger with unkempt hair, strands of it falling over his eyebrows. Smoke was curling off a forgotten cigarette in the ashtray beside him. He must have been sitting there for some time, waiting for me to awake, contemplating the quiet.

  I sat up gingerly and that triggered a nauseating pain that swam through my eyes and swamped my head. I touched the bandages on my cheek and ear, saw dried blood on my sleeve and the front of my shirt, raw cuts on the knuckles of my right hand.

  “How do you feel?” Junior said. His serene face amplified the sincerity in his voice. He filled a glass with water from a pitcher.

  “Not good.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Not sure I can stand. What time is it?”

  “Six in the morning. You’ve been out for most of the night. We had someone stitch up your cheek and your ear. You’ll be fine except for the headache. You will need some food, though. Do you think you can drive?”

  “Is that something you want me to do?”

  “It would be good for you, yes.”

  “What about the hotel? And Suzy? What about your father?”

  “That is all done and over with now.”

  Junior pushed a button on the phone beside him. A voice on the speaker said “Ye
s” in Vietnamese, and Junior issued some kind of order and hung up. He opened the prescription bottle on the desk, shook out a few pills. He carried the glass of water over to me and presented it along with the three white pills on his palm.

  “For the pain,” he said and set the prescription bottle on the coffee table in front of me and returned to the desk chair. He saw me studying the pills. “Don’t worry, Mr. Robert. If I wanted to do something bad to you, I would have left you in the fire last night.”

  As I downed the pills, a vision of the Christmas tree ablaze came back to me and with it another wave of nausea. “There was a fire. You mean the house . . .”

  “Yes. We didn’t stay to see it burn to the ground, of course, but we saw enough.”

  “And Happy?”

  He let the question linger between us for a moment. “I had to make a quick decision. She was already dead, Mr. Robert.”

  “Jesus Christ. She didn’t deserve that. Even if she was already dead.”

  “I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

  “Your father—he strangled her.”

  “I know.”

  “I came there to talk to her and find out where Suzy might have gone. That was it. I had no idea he’d be there. I’d been waiting all day at the hotel—”

  Junior waved his hand. “None of that matters anymore. Frankly, I don’t care what you were trying to do. It’s all over now.”

  “Why would your father do that to her?”

  He got up from the chair impatiently and faced the bookshelf, his hands in his pants pockets. His manner seemed defeated, but I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or sadness.

  With his back to me, he said, “Do you know what it’s like to spend your entire life with someone who must always be held back? Muzzled? Contained? The worst part is that you understand it—you understand everything about them. You’re the only one in the world who does. So you live with it. You live with the . . . It’s not fear, really. It’s futility. You know they’re always on the verge of something you cannot control. It is not wise to go about loving someone in this manner.”