by Vu Tran
With one hand, he started pressing against the spines of books so that they were all perfectly aligned on the shelf—a habit I indulged at home with my own books.
“Since Sunday,” he continued, “when Miss Hong disappeared, my father has been on the precipice of one thing after the other. He was convinced she had run away with another man. He was convinced you were this man. He was convinced that Happy must have helped her steal his money. Anything would have put him over the edge, but something about Happy cut him much deeper. He had let her in—like he had let Miss Hong in. The thought of the two of them conspiring against him . . . that was too much. I still don’t know what Happy did, but last night I found out that she had quit her job at the casino and would be moving back to Oakland.”
“Who told you this?”
He ignored the question, aligning the books with both hands now.
“It was a mistake to tell him. He went into a rage, convinced it was proof she had deceived him too. He wanted to go confront her himself this time—in the middle of the Stratosphere if he had to. He wanted to hurt her. It took all my energy just to keep him from going to the Coronado to hurt you. But I couldn’t keep him still forever. There’s just so much you can do. You can try to minimize the damage, fix what you can afterward. When he called to tell me what he’d done, I was horrified, I did not think he would go that far—but I was not surprised.”
“Not surprised?” I said. The loudness of my own voice deepened the ache in my skull. “You could’ve done something. She didn’t have to die.”
“He would have found some other way to hurt her. Sooner or later. I told you, my father is not one for forgiveness.”
“Bullshit. You can’t just give up and let someone go crazy on the world.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never given up on anyone.”
He had started reshelving some of the books, slowly and methodically—stubbornly.
I said, “So what now? You still gonna protect him? Let him get away with it? They’re gonna find out, you know. Even if the whole place is a pile of ash, they’ll figure out what he did.”
He stopped and turned to me, a book aloft in his hand. “Mr. Robert—you were the only person we removed from that house last night.”
He shelved the book and returned both hands to his pockets and stood there with his back to me.
“He was still breathing. I felt his pulse. Right here.” He placed two fingers on the side of his neck. “My only consolation was that he was not awake to see me walk out the door with you. All my life, even as a child, I’ve always known that some day I’d have to do what I did last night.”
I was too stunned to say anything. I could see it all in his bowed head, his stillness. What he’d done was a sacrifice, but also a betrayal. There would be no getting away from that. And if there was any relief, there would also forever be regret and shame and anger and, worst of all, doubt. He must have known all this when he walked out of that burning house with my lifeless body. I couldn’t help admiring him, despite there being nothing admirable about any of it.
Maybe that was when I accepted that I’d have to give up on Suzy and on everything that tied me to her. A heavy finality fell over me, heavier than what I felt that night I hit her, like I could no longer remember her or any part of our marriage correctly—like a stone door had closed on the last ten years of my life.
A soft knock came at the door. It opened, and Victor appeared, carrying my duffel bag and a small paper sack. Junior gestured for him to come in and close the door.
Victor didn’t make eye contact until he was standing above me. If he was upset with me for disobeying him, I couldn’t tell. He set everything on the coffee table, including my car keys.
Junior said, “That is food. Take it with you. It’s nearly daylight now. I have no idea how long it will take the authorities to identify my father’s body and then contact me. I’m fairly confident, though, that you will not want to be here when that happens.”
The door opened again and this time it was the giant Menen dez, his face as expressionless as it had been five months before. I felt a strange tenderness at the sight of him ducking under the doorframe. He must have carried me last night. I wondered if behind that inscrutable face he ever thought about the things he was ordered to do or the people he did them to, if it mattered to him that he had to take one body and not the other.
Victor started for the door, but Junior said, “Not yet. Mr. Robert, before you make your departure, I need to take care of some unresolved issues. One is this.”
He opened a desk drawer and pulled out Suzy’s red journal. He held it open, turning the pages delicately.
“Very many years ago,” he said, “when I first knew Miss Hong, I asked her what she was writing in this book, and she replied that she was writing letters to someone who would never read them. I didn’t quite understand that at the time, but I took it very seriously. I still do. You took this from my father’s house five months ago. I would say you stole it from him, but it wasn’t his. Nor is it mine or yours. That’s the way it should remain.”
He ripped out a handful of pages, then tossed the journal into the metal trashcan by the desk. He took the lighter on the desk and lit the pages in his hand, watching the flames grow into a torch before also dropping it into the trashcan. He peered darkly at me as curls of smoke began rising and that sweet burning smell filled the room. All the while I thought about running over and saving the journal, but it was like Junior already knew that I wouldn’t, that the fight in me had already been exhausted.
“I’ve been sitting here watching you asleep on that couch,” he said, “asking myself why I let you live. My only answer is that letting you die would gain me nothing. I learned that from my father. Don’t do something if you have nothing to gain from it.”
Smoke was drifting all over the office, past Victor and Menen dez and out the doorway. We all remained silent amid the soft crackling and the swirling haze, watching Junior as he watched the fire. After a minute more, he picked up the pitcher of water and emptied it into the trash can. Then he set the pitcher down on the desk with a loud thud that startled Victor.
Calmly, I said, “You had no right. It wasn’t yours to destroy.”
“Yes, that is true. But I’m doing you a favor one last time, Mr. Robert. I’m saving you from futility. It’s like my father always said about poker. Even if all the cards are shown, the story is still incomplete. It’ll always be incomplete. Live with it.”
“You’re punishing me. That’s what you’re doing.”
“Yes, that is true too. But you’re not alone.”
He turned now to Victor and stared at him as if waiting for him to speak first. I would always remember Victor’s immediate glance at Menendez, who was blocking the entire doorway. His face, its blank intensity, betrayed too much. Junior was probably only a few years his senior, but for the moment he seemed decades older.
“Victor, I want you to answer me honestly. Did you help Miss Hong steal my father’s money?”
I expected Victor to acknowledge me now in some way, but he was too dumbstruck to do anything but stare back at his interrogator.
“I don’t care about the money,” Junior told him. “I don’t care about anything else you did. All I want to know is whether you helped her betray my father.”
Victor let the silence swell a moment more before replying, “Yes. I did help her.” He started to say something in Vietnamese, but Junior held up his hand.
“No, no. Speak English so that Mr. Robert will understand.”
The look Victor finally gave me was not angry or uncertain or even fearful. It was oddly conspiratorial, like he and I had planned this very moment. “She was afraid for her life,” he said, “so she asked me for help. I felt a duty to help her.”
“And your duty to my father? To me?”
“She was afraid. She had no one else. I couldn’t say no.”
Junior considered that for a moment, then walked around the de
sk. “That doesn’t make sense to me. You can always say no. You have a tongue, don’t you?”
They were a foot apart now. Victor opened his mouth to reply, but Junior struck him with a vicious upward blow, a palm heel to the chin that flung his head back and sent him stumbling into Menendez’s chest.
I leaped to my feet, and the sudden movement made me light-headed. I managed to say, “Wait, goddamn it!”
No one paid me any attention.
Victor was bent over, grimacing and cupping his mouth like it was swollen inside. He had bitten his tongue badly. I could already see blood on his lips and his fingers. From behind him, Menendez had both hands on his shoulders like he was either consoling him or propping him up. Then he gently nudged him forward toward Junior.
“What were you going to say?” Junior asked.
Gently, affectionately it seemed, he pulled Victor’s hand away from his mouth and lifted his chin with a finger to inspect the damage. Then he put his other hand on Victor’s shoulder, as if coming in for a hug, but in one swift motion slipped behind him and wrapped his arm tightly around his throat as the other hand gripped the back of his head.
Victor came alive and grasped at Junior’s forearm to break the chokehold, lifting him off the ground for a second before backing him into the bookshelf and knocking books onto the floor. But Junior was glued to him, his hold as tight as a vise. Victor was tucking in his chin and managed to reach behind his head to grab Junior’s sleeve, and that’s when Junior kneed him brutally in the ribs, which made him gasp. From there the chokehold was unbreakable. His face reddened, his eyes started rolling back, and moments later his body went limp, crumpling to the floor.
I made a move toward him, but Junior threw up his hand and pointed at me like he was brandishing a dagger. He was standing over Victor’s prone body, his rolled-up sleeve kissed with blood. I was startled by the sight of him so unrecognizably disheveled and out of breath, flushed with anger as Menendez loomed behind him like his gargoyled shadow.
He nudged Victor’s head with his shoe, then nudged it again much harder.
Victor shuddered suddenly, and I heard the violent insuck of breath as his back rose like a tide. He was gasping and coughing into the floor, holding on to his side as he also grabbed at his throat, his legs writhing slowly like he was in the midst of a troubling dream.
I don’t know if it was relief or guilt or the throbbing in my own head, but I sank back down onto the couch.
Junior took a deep breath. He stepped over Victor and returned to the desk. I saw him open the drawer again and this time pull out a switchblade, the same one he had used on me. He set it on the desk.
“Please get up, Mr. Robert,” he said, slicking back his hair and tucking in his shirt. “It’s time for you to go.”
“What are you going to do to him?”
“It has nothing to do with you. I’m letting you leave. Be satisfied with that.”
“You can’t expect me to see this and just go.”
“That’s very heroic of you. But I’m giving Victor what he deserves.”
“He doesn’t deserve to . . . I won’t let you.”
“You misunderstand. I have no intention of killing Victor. He will be fine—you have my word. He’s like a brother to me. He’s all the family I have now. But punishment is punishment. We all get our due sooner or later.”
Junior walked over to the wall clock beside the geisha painting. He said to me, “Menendez will take you to your car. This will be the last time we see each other. As far as I am concerned, I do not know you, I have never met you, and you have never been to Las Vegas in your life. In return, I recommend you never set foot back in this city.”
He turned the hands of the clock in the same combination he did five months before.
As the painting crept open, as Victor continued groaning and writhing on the floor five feet from me, I thought of Sonny and Happy and of all the letters that surely went up in flames alongside their bodies.
Menendez followed me down the dark stairway, but as the painting started closing behind us, I called over my shoulder, “I was here, though. I was here, and everything happened.”
I could no longer see Junior. I was not sure he even heard me.
18
AS I DROVE OUT of the city, the sun shone as intensely as it had the previous morning. The sky was the color of the Pacific in July. The farther south I drove on the 15, the less snow I could see. Only a few unmelted patches on the shoulders of the highway, the broken lumps on the tops of passing cars, spitting flurries onto my windshield. It was strange to see green palm trees swaying in the breeze and beyond them the vague warm mountains, because in the bright sunlight, if you squint, it all seems like a vision from some tropical island.
I held on to that thought to lessen the pain in my head. To bury as much as I could of the last two days.
It was my second and my last time leaving Las Vegas. The farther away I got, the more I felt I was shedding some pitch-dark side of myself that the place had awoken. Maybe it was my most genuine side. It doesn’t matter ultimately—who you think you are. Sonny and Happy had died, and mourning one and cursing the other made me no more wiser about the things that people do to each other. In the end, good and bad people perish all the same.
I felt inside my duffel bag for the videotape. It was still there, though its value was lost on me now. It would never tell me where Suzy went or what new life she would find for herself. It would never tell me what she had actually written me or what else had happened in that hotel room. All it contained were darkened glimpses of two people whose love for each other somehow lasted for over twenty years.
Two hours out, I stopped at a gas station to fill up my car and change out of my bloody clothes. I threw away the food and painkillers Junior had given me and bought a bottle of ibuprofen, some cold sandwiches and hot coffee, and a pair of cheap sunglasses to cover up my bruised eye and shade myself from the harsh sunlight.
It was still desert all around me, gray mountains behind brown mountains, miles of hoary creosote bushes blanketing the flat land like a bed of thorns. I ate all the sandwiches sitting on the frigid hood of my car and drank my coffee slowly and decided I was never coming back to this or any desert.
Only then did I call Tommy.
As soon as he heard my voice, he said, “What the hell did you do, man?”
“I can explain the girl,” I said.
“What girl? There’s no girl. All I see is a suitcase at my front door with fifty fucking grand inside and a note with your name on it. And oh yeah, your badge.”
He grilled me with a string of questions, but I wasn’t listening. I hung up without saying another word.
I sat in the car for a while, sifting through my surprise, my disappointment, and eventually the realization that I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.
I considered tossing the videotape then. Run over it with my car first. Burn it and let it melt into the desert dust. If Mai was gone now, why hold on to anything else, especially this?
But I kept it. I would never watch it again, but somehow it felt right to save this one reminder. At least it wasn’t some heartfelt memento of something we once had. On the tape was everything I knew about her and everything I would never know. That wasn’t enough, but at least it was real.
Acknowledgments
A humble and heartfelt thanks to the following people:
My parents, Son and Nhai, for their love, their sacrifices, and their countless stories.
My sister Mai, who fights crime, is a fount of invaluable information, and has always taken care of me.
My brother Joseph, who has exceptional taste and an exceptionally good heart and is also one of my best friends.
My editor, Alane Salierno Mason, who made this book a great deal better, whose judgment I implicitly trust, and whose tremendous support I will always be grateful for.
My agent, Ellen Levine, whose patience and commitment and enthusiasm over so many years—i
ncluding the uncertain ones—has meant the world to me.
My 12th-grade English teacher, Pat Sherbert, who taught me how to value literature.
My teachers at the University of Tulsa: Grace Mojtabai, Lars Engle, Gordon Taylor, James Watson, and George Gilpin.
My teachers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: Ethan Canin, Chris Offutt, Frank Conroy, Sam Chang, and Marilynne Robinson. And of course Connie Brothers.
Everyone at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, including Carol Harter and my indispensable mentors, Doug Unger and Richard Wiley, who have both given me so so much. Also from Las Vegas: the generous Glenn Schaeffer and the incomparable Dave Hickey, who sharpened my tastes and ambitions and gave me a little necessary edge.
My colleagues in the Committee on Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, especially Dan Raeburn, an outstanding writer and an outstanding friend.
Jenny Swann, a fantastic and crucial reader.
Julie Thi Underhill, who has believed in me since the sixth grade.
Stuart Jacobsen, my first serious reader.
Jarret Keene, who asked me to write the story that became this novel.
Embry Clark, Jess McCall, Aimee Phan, Matt Shears, John Nardone, Jason Coley, Ingrid Truman, and Peyton Marshall—whose friendship has been a refuge.
All the generous and supportive people at the Whiting Foundation and the Vilcek Foundation.
And finally, Kate Hoctor, my best reader and my best friend, without whom so much of this book could not have been improved, figured out, or struggled through into the light of day.
Copyright © 2015 by Vu Tran
All rights reserved
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