After I dance and put on my clothes and go and sit at the bar, these men in the jackets do not come near me. But one other man comes and stands beside me and he calls me “Miss.” He says, “Miss, may I sit down?” If you want to sit next to a bargirl and hope that she will think you are an okay man, this is a good way to start, with “May I sit down, Miss.” I look at this man and he is a tall man with a long neck so that he seems to stretch up as high as he can to see over a fence. His skin is dark, like he’s been in the sun too long, and he is wearing a plaid shirt and blue jeans and his hands are rough, but there is no white band where a ring has been taken off. I look at his face and his eyes are black, but very small. His nose is long. Vietnam noses are not long, and though I know many Americans in my life and some French, too, I still lean back just a little when there is a long nose, because it seems to be pointing at me.
This man is not number one for looking at him, but he calls me “Miss” and he stands with his eyes looking down and then he peeks at me and then he. lowers his eyes again as he waits for me to say if he can sit down. So I say yes. He seems like a nice man.
“You are very beautiful, Miss Noi,” this man says.
This is 1981 and Miss Noi is thirty years old and I am glad to hear some man say it this way. I am not sexy bitch, wiggle it baby, oh boy oh boy it’s hot, it feels good. These are okay things, too, for Miss Noi. These men give me money and they love me. But this man says I am beautiful and I say, “Thank you. You buy me a drink, okay?” I say this to all the men who sit next to me at the bar. This is what I am supposed to do. But I want this man to buy me a drink because he thinks I am beautiful. So he buys me a drink and I say he must buy one, too, and he buys a Dr Pepper, even though it is the same price as a drink of liquor. My drink is supposed to be liquor but it is mostly water, like Saigon tea. They make it the same in New Orleans, the New Orleans tea.
We sip our drinks and he does not have many words to say. He sips and looks at me and sips and I have many words I use on men. You from this town? You in New Orleans for long? You like Bourbon Street? You listen to jazz music? What is your work? But I do not use these words. I tell you I am sometimes very tired. This man’s long nose dips down toward his Dr Pepper like he’s going to drink through it, but it stops and then he lifts his chin a little and sips at his straw. His face seems very strange-looking and his hair is black but a little greasy and I just let him be quiet if he wants and I am quiet, too. Then he says, “It was nice to see you dance.”
“You come often and see me dance and buy me drinks, okay?”
“You look different,” he says.
“Miss Noi is a Vietnam girl. You never see that before.”
“I seen it,” this man says. “I was in Vietnam.”
I have many men say they were in my country and they always sound a little funny, like they have a nasty secret or a sickness that you should be careful not to catch. And sometimes they just call it “Nam,” saying that word with broken glass in their voice or saying it through their noses and their noses wrinkle up like the word smells when it comes out. But this man says the name of my country quiet and I don’t always understand what American voices do, but he sounds sad to me. I say to him, “You didn’t like being there? It makes you sad?”
He lifts his face and looks at me and he says, “I was very happy there. Weren’t you?”
Well, this is something for me to think about. I could just answer this man, who is only one more man who saw me dance naked. I could just say yes or no and I could talk about reasons why. I am good at bargirl bullshit when I want to talk like that. But this man’s eyes look at mine and I look away and sip my drink.
What do I know about men, after all? I can’t tell anything anymore. I take men to my bed and I save my money and there have been very many men, I guess. It’s like eating too many apples. You take a bite now and you can make yourself remember that apples are sweet, but it is like the apple in your mouth is not even there. You eat too many apples and all you can do is remember them. So this man who comes with his strange face and sounds sad when he talks about Vietnam because he was so happy there—I don’t know what to make of him and so I take him to my room and he is very happy about that.
He tells me his name is Fontenot. He lives far away from New Orleans. He owns a little boat and he works fixing car engines. He was in Saigon one year working on car engines and he loved that city very much. I ask him why but he can’t really explain. This is all of our talk, every bit of it, except before he makes love to me he says he is sorry he can never get his hands clean. He shows me how the grease from the car engines gets around his fingernails and he can’t get them clean. I tell him not to worry and he makes love to me, and when he gets off me and lies down, he turns his head and I think that is because he does not want me to see that he is crying. I want to ask if he is very sad again, but I don’t say anything. His face is away from me and he wants it like that and so I say nothing. Those are all the words of that night. In the morning I go into the bathroom and he is in the tub and I kneel beside him and take his hands and I have a cuticle file and I clean the grease away. He kisses my hands when he leaves.
What do I know about men anymore? That is not much to say about Mr. Fontenot. He came to see Miss Noi on a Saturday night and left on Sunday morning. Then the next Saturday night I was naked on the stage and I saw his face at the foot of the runway, looking up with his long nose pointed at my special part, and I felt a strange thing. My face got warm and I turned my back to him and danced away. After I finished my dance, I got dressed and came out to the bar, but he was not there. I asked the guy behind the bar, “Did you see that tall man with the thin neck and the long nose that I had a drink with last week?”
This guy says, “The one who looks like a goddamn goose?”
I don’t like this guy behind the bar. I never even learn his name. So I say, “Go to hell, you,” and I go outside and there is Mr. Fontenot waiting on the sidewalk. I go to him and I take his arm and we go around the comer and down the block and he says, “I couldn’t hang around in there, Miss Noi. It makes me uncomfortable to talk to you in there.”
I say, “I know, honey. I know.” I see all types of men, though I realize I don’t understand any of them deep down. But I know some men feel nervous in a bar. They come there to meet me but then they tell themselves that I really don’t belong there, it’s not worthy of me. And if I take this type of man to my room, they give me money quiet, folding the bills and putting them under a vase or somewhere, like it’s not really happening. I know that kind of man. They can be very sweet sometimes.
We go up to my apartment again. It is a small place, like Saigon. I am comfortable there. Outside my window is a phony balcony. It looks like a balcony but it is only a foot wide, just a grill on the window. But it is nice. It looks like lace, though it is made of iron. I close the shade and turn to Mr. Fontenot and he is sitting on my bed. I go and sit next to him.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he says.
“You drive all the way back to New Orleans just to see Miss Noi again?”
“Of course,” he says. His voice is gentle, but there’s also something in it that says I should know this already. This is plenty strange to me, because I know nothing about Mr. Fontenot, really. A few words. He’s a quiet man. I know nothing more about him than any man.
Then he says, “Look,” and he shows me his hands. I don’t understand. “I got one of those things you used on me last week.” I look closer and I see that his hands are clean.
This makes me feel one more strange thing, a little sinking inside me. I say, “See? You have no need for Miss Noi anymore.”
He takes me serious. He puts his arm around my shoulders and he is right to do this. “Don’t say that, Miss Noi.”
So then we make love. When we are finished, he turns his face away from me again and I reach over and turn it back. There are no tears, but he is looking very serious. I say, “Tell me one thing you like in Saigon.�
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Mr. Fontenot wiggles his shoulders and looks away. “Everything,” he says.
“Why should I not think you are a crazy man? Everybody knows Americans go to Vietnam and they want to go home quick and forget everything. When they think they like Vietnam while they are there, they come home and they know it was all just a dream.”
Mr. Fontenot looks at me one more time. “I’m not crazy. I liked everything there.”
“ ‘Everything’ means same as ‘nothing.’ I do not understand that. One thing. Just think about you on a street in Saigon and you tell me one thing.”
“Okay,” he says and then he says it again louder, “Okay,” like I just push him some more, though I say nothing. It is louder but not angry. He sounds like a little boy. He wrinkles his brow and his little black eyes close. He stays like this for too long.
I ask, “So?”
“I can’t think.”
“You are on a street. Just one moment for me.”
“Okay,” he says. “A street. It’s hot in Saigon, like Louisiana. I like it hot. I walk around. There’s lots of people rushing around, all of them pretty as nutria.”
“Pretty as what?”
“It’s a little animal that has a pretty coat. It’s good.”
“Tell me more.”
“Okay,” he says. “Here’s something. It’s hot and I’m sweating and I’m walking through your markets in the open air and when I get back to my quarters, my sweat smells like the fruit and the vegetables in your markets.”
I look at Mr. Fontenot and his eyes are on me and he’s very serious. I do not understand a word he’s saying now, but I know he’s not saying any bullshit, that’s for sure. He sweats and smells like fruit in Saigon. I want to talk to him now, but what am I to say to this? So I just start in about fruit. I tell him the markets have many good fruits, which I like very much. Mangoes, mangosteens, jackfruit, durians, papaya. I ask him and he says he has not eaten any of these. I still want to say words, to keep this going, so I tell him, “One fruit we do not have in South Vietnam is apples. I loved apples in Saigon when GI bring me apples from their mess hall. I never have apples till the GIs give them to me.”
As soon as I say this, Mr. Fontenot’s brow wrinkles again and I feel like there’s a little animal, maybe a nutria, trying to claw his way out from inside Miss Noi. I have made this man think about all the GIs that I sleep with in Saigon. He knows now what kind of girl he is talking to. This time I turn my face away from him to hide tears. Then we stop talking and we sleep and in the morning he goes and I do not come and help him bathe because he learns from Miss Noi already how to clean his hands.
Is this a sad story or a happy story for Miss Noi? The next Saturday Mr. Fontenot does not come and see me dance naked. I sit at the bar with my clothes on and I am upon a time and I wonder if I’m going to fall off now. Then boom. I go out of that place and Mr. Fontenot is standing on the sidewalk. He is wearing a suit with a tie and his neck reaches up high out of his white shirt and I can bet his hands are clean and he moves to me and one of his hands comes out from behind his back and he gives me an apple and he says he wants to marry Miss Noi.
Once upon a time there was a duck with a long neck and a long beak like all ducks and he lives in a place all alone and he does not know how to build a nest or preen his own feathers. Because of this, the sun shines down and bums him, makes his feathers turn dark and makes him very sad. When he lies down to sleep, you think that he is dead, he is so sad and still. Then one day he flies to another part of the land and he finds a little animal with a nice coat and though that animal is different from him, a nutria, still he lies down beside her. He seems to be all burnt up and dead. But the nutria does not think so and she licks his feathers and makes him well. Then he takes her with him to live in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where he fixes cars and she has a nice little house and she is a housewife with a toaster machine and they go fishing together in his little boat and she never eats an apple unless he thinks to give it to her. Though this may not be very often, they taste very good to her.
CRICKETS
They call me Ted where I work and they’ve called me that for over a decade now and it still bothers me, though I’m not very happy about my real name being the same as the former President of the former Republic of Vietnam. Thiu is not an uncommon name in my homeland and my mother had nothing more in mind than a long-dead uncle when she gave it to me. But in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I am Ted. I guess the other Mr. Thiu has enough of my former country’s former gold bullion tucked away so that in London, where he probably wears a bowler and carries a rolled umbrella, nobody’s calling him anything but Mr. Thiu.
I hear myself sometimes and I sound pretty bitter, I guess. But I don’t let that out at the refinery, where I’m the best chemical engineer they’ve got and they even admit it once in a while. They’re good-hearted people, really. I’ve done enough fighting in my life. I was eighteen when Saigon fell and I was only recently mustered into the Army, and when my unit dissolved and everybody ran, I stripped off my uniform and put on my civilian clothes again and I threw rocks at the North’s tanks when they rolled through the streets. Very few of my people did likewise. I stayed in the mouths of alleys so I could run and then return and throw more rocks, but because what I did seemed so isolated and so pathetic a gesture, the gunners in the tanks didn’t even take notice. But I didn’t care about their scorn. At least my right arm had said no to them.
And then there were Thai Pirates in the South China Sea and idiots running the refugee centers and more idiots running the agencies in the U.S. to find a place for me and my new bride, who braved with me the midnight escape by boat and the terrible sea and all the rest. We ended up here in the flat bayou land of Louisiana, where there are rice paddies and where the water and the land are in the most delicate balance with each other, very much like the Mekong Delta, where I grew up. These people who work around me are good people and maybe they call me Ted because they want to think of me as one of them, though sometimes it bothers me that these men are so much bigger than me. I am the size of a woman in this country and these American men are all massive and they speak so slowly, even to one another, even though English is their native language. I’ve heard New Yorkers on television and I speak as fast as they do.
My son is beginning to speak like the others here in Louisiana. He is ten, the product of the first night my wife and I spent in Lake Charles, in a cheap motel with the sky outside red from the refineries. He is proud to have been born in America, and when he leaves us in the morning to walk to the Catholic school, he says, “Have a good day, y’all.” Sometimes I say good-bye to him in Vietnamese and he wrinkles his nose at me and says, “Aw, Pop,” like I’d just cracked a corny joke. He doesn’t speak Vietnamese at all and my wife says not to worry about that. He’s an American.
But I do worry about that, though I understand why I should be content. I even understood ten years ago, so much so that I agreed with my wife and gave my son an American name. Bill. Bill and his father Ted. But this past summer I found my son hanging around the house bored in the middle of vacation and I was suddenly his father Thiu with a wonderful idea for him. It was an idea that had come to me in the first week of every February we’d been in Lake Charles, because that’s when the crickets always begin to crow here. This place is rich in crickets, which always make me think of my own childhood in Vietnam. But I never said anything to my son until last summer.
I came to him after watching him slouch around the yard one Sunday pulling the Spanish moss off the lowest branches of our big oak tree and then throwing rocks against the stop sign on our corner. “Do you want to do something fun?” I said to him.
“Sure, Pop,” he said, though there was a certain suspicion in his voice, like he didn’t trust me on the subject of fun. He threw all the rocks at once that were left in his hand and the stop sign shivered at their impact.
I said, “If you keep that up, they will arrest me for the destruction of ci
ty property and then they will deport us all.”
My son laughed at this. I, of course, knew that he would know I was bluffing. I didn’t want to be too hard on him for the boyish impulses that I myself had found to be so satisfying when I was young, especially since I was about to share something of my own childhood with him.
“So what’ve you got, Pop?” my son asked me.
“Fighting crickets,” I said.
“What?”
Now, my son was like any of his fellow ten-year-olds, devoted to superheroes and the mighty clash of good and evil in all of its high-tech forms in the Saturday-morning cartoons. Just to make sure he was in the right frame of mind, I explained it to him with one word, “Cricketmen,” and I thought this was a pretty good ploy. He cocked his head in interest at this and I took him to the side porch and sat him down and I explained.
I told him how, when I was a boy, my friends and I would prowl the undergrowth and capture crickets and keep them in matchboxes. We would feed them leaves and bits of watermelon and bean sprouts, and we’d train them to fight by keeping them in a constant state of agitation by blowing on them and gently flicking the ends of their antennas with a sliver of wood. So each of us would have a stable of fighting crickets, and there were two kinds.
At this point my son was squirming a little bit and his eyes were shifting away into the yard and I knew that my Cricketman trick had run its course. I fought back the urge to challenge his set of interests. Why should the stiff and foolish fights of his cartoon characters absorb him and the real clash—real life and death—that went on in the natural world bore him? But I realized that I hadn’t cut to the chase yet, as they say on the TV. “They fight to the death,” I said with as much gravity as I could put into my voice, like I was James Earl Jones.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories Page 6
