I Swear I'll Make It Up to You

by Mishka Shubaly

  The lone ray of light that bleak winter was Chuong.

  A new kid had appeared in my sixth-grade class one morning. He was Asian, a couple of inches shorter than me, well muscled but with a finer structure. Chuong was from Vietnam, our teacher explained, and he had just arrived in America. He had endured a dangerous boat ride and then spent two years in a refugee camp in Malaysia. He was fourteen, a couple of years older than us, but he spoke little English, so he would study with our class. We were to make him feel welcome.

  When we all stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, he stayed seated, his head down.

  “Chuong,” I said under my breath.

  He looked at me.

  I gestured for him to stand, and he did. While the rest of the class said the Pledge of Allegiance, Chuong stood there silently, not speaking. Like me.

  My teacher pulled me aside at lunch. The new boy had moved in across the street from me with an uncle he didn’t know. Could I try to befriend him? That night, after dinner, I went over to call on him.

  A tall, thin, stern Vietnamese man answered the door. Chuong had run away, he told me. That quick, huh? Well, which way did he go? Chuong’s uncle pointed to his left, up the street.

  It was dark by the time I caught up with Chuong, walking stiffly upright in Bugle Boy pants, a long-sleeve plaid shirt, a green baseball hat perched high on his head, and flip-flops. I fell into step with him.

  He spoke almost no English, and I spoke no Vietnamese, but he was able to communicate to me that he had a friend in Houston. He was going to walk there. The moon was already high in the sky, and it was starting to get chilly.

  I stopped him and went down on one knee on the sidewalk. Chuong dropped to his haunches next to me. I put one little stone down.

  “Uncle. Yes?” I said.

  He nodded his head.

  I took another little rock and held it up for him to see.

  “Chuong. Yes?”

  Again he nodded.

  I made a walking gesture with the fingers on one hand to signify walking for a long time and then put the stone down about a quarter of an inch away from the Uncle stone. I grabbed a third, larger stone and held it up for him.

  “Houston. Yes?”

  Again, Chuong nodded, cocking one eyebrow at me, curious.

  I stood up and threw the rock as far as I could down the street. We watched it bounce once and then disappear into the darkness. Chuong looked at me, his eyes wide.

  “Ahhh,” he said, crestfallen.

  “It’s really far,” I said. “Really, really, really far.”

  He let out a deep sigh. We turned around and headed home.

  Chuong was a marvel. He could outrun anyone, and in flip-flops. He could fart on command. He’d grown up on the streets of Saigon, and his body was covered in scars, a slash across his chest where he’d been cut with a sharpened key and an ugly star on his forehead where he’d been hit with a bottle. My mother told me that people had committed suicide on the boat to Malaysia by throwing themselves overboard because the conditions had been so bad. It was whispered that Chuong had only been sent on to America because he and some friends had ganged up on and killed a guard in the refugee camp who had been abusing them. His life was so cool, vastly superior to my boring life of spelling homework and cleaning the cat litter.

  Chuong’s uncle had little patience for the nephew he didn’t know, so Chuong slept at our house more than at his home, cooking mountains of egg rolls for us on the weekends. Chuong taught me how to make weapons out of scrap metal, how to shift your center of gravity when running so no one could catch you, and how to tattoo yourself with a pencil, a sewing needle, and ashes. I taught him how to speak English by explaining heavy metal songs on the radio, sitcoms on TV, and Police Academy movies. When we left for school in the morning, he echoed my farewell to my mother: “Bye, Mom!”

  In seventh grade, his uncle finally threw him out, and he was assigned to foster care in Albuquerque. My mom and I were heartbroken. Each time we went to visit him, his situation was worse. He had dropped out of school; then his foster family had kicked him out; then he had run away from the group home. Our last visit, it had taken hours to track him down through his friends. He was thin and gray from smoking more than he ate. He had cut the tip off a finger making jewelry in a sweatshop, then stuck it back on with a Band-Aid.

  Our last Christmas in New Mexico, Chuong came to spend a week with us. I spent the entire time lobbying for him to come to New Hampshire with us. My parents finally assented. It only took one visit to his social worker to get permission. Nobody else wanted him.

  I could not believe my parents had agreed. Chuong, my hilarious best friend, singing filthy made-up lyrics to Skid Row songs while dancing with the dogs . . . Every night would be like a sleepover.

  Still, getting out of the car in New Hampshire to those oppressive clots of wet snow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, by leaving New Mexico, we had made a terrible mistake.

  Our house in New Hampshire was a ramshackle five-bedroom on a swampy one-acre lot off a minor highway. It was an old farmhouse that had been extended twice, first on one side, then the other. The basement leaked and stank of black mold and cat piss. There was no air-conditioning, and the ground floor was only heated by a small woodstove. Los Alamos had been subject to extreme weather, with summer days that regularly broke a hundred degrees and massive snowstorms that buried our vehicles, but it was dry heat that disappeared each night, and the sun shone brightly between dumps of snow. New Hampshire was a hot, wet, inescapable jungle all summer, an icy and sunless gulag all winter, and gray for weeks in between.

  Our house was surrounded on three sides by woods that quickly devolved into swamp. Our lone neighbor across the highway was an old farmer who had more than eighty cats. He was hunched with age, long past working. The only thing his farm produced was more cats. He fed them each morning but declined to neuter/spay them or to provide veterinary care. Virtually all of them developed huge, crusty scabs in the corners of their eyes, eventually creeping off to the woods to die or getting run over by the heavy trucks that barreled down the highway in front of our house.

  “White trash” was not a phrase I’d heard in Canada or New Mexico. In Canada, nearly everyone had gardened, hunted, and fished and knew how to stretch a dollar. Everyone wore hand-me-downs without shame. In fact, a hand-me-down shirt was almost preferable to a “new” shirt from the Whistle Stop Thrift Store—a hand-me-down was something of Tatyana’s I had coveted for months, maybe even a year. That it now fit me proved that I had grown into it, which meant I was becoming like my older sister, whom I envied, and had also won a victory over her by getting something away from her. In New Mexico, I was vaguely aware of us having more money than some of my friends’ families and less than others, but poverty was not something I was keenly aware of.

  In New Hampshire, poverty was everywhere. According to the 1990 census, New Hampshire was more than 98 percent white at the time. I recall there being a total of three black kids in our school—one set of twins and their cousin—and one Puerto Rican. Our school district was the poorest in the state. In our town, poverty and white trash Yankee pride had curdled into something toxic, a specific decaying northeastern despair.

  The locals gave my mother the cold shoulder because we were “from away,” and unless your grandparents had been born in Kingston, you would always be “from away.” And wasn’t it a little suspicious that the wife still went by her maiden name and that the dad was never around? And they had that teenager, Chinese or whatever, who barely spoke English and wasn’t in school, and then the little girl with the hearing aids, who was also some kind of colored person?

  Tatyana was heartbroken for her teenage love. Chuong missed his unsupervised, chaotic life among the other Vietnamese immigrants in the city. Tashina missed her friends and, young as she was, understood she didn’t fit in here as she had in New Mexico with her black, Asian, and Native American friends. I didn’t miss New Mexico or anyone
there. I had been wretched there. But this? We were bored, we were lonely, we were uncomfortable. We suffered. We complained. We turned on my father for once again dragging us across the continent. He retreated—into his work, into his travel, into his workshop and a six-pack of Budweiser.

  My father had always been a cypher. Our mother made sure we were well versed in his folklore: the drunken antics of his college rugby team, his beloved MG convertible that had been stolen out of their driveway, how he had been building his own remote-controlled airplanes since he was a boy. As little kids, we laughed at his foibles: He had thought that he didn’t want kids! He was so absent-minded that our mother had been the one to propose! But who was he? We knew we adored him. Tatyana and I were allowed to crawl into bed with him one Easter morning, and I had been thrilled to be allowed to be that close to him. His feelings toward us were less clear. We weren’t allowed to jump on him—remember, his bad back from the rugby injury. We weren’t to pester him when he was working in his shop at night or on the weekends. He was Dad; he was inside the very core of who we were, but somehow he remained a stranger. I remember trying to make sense of it, even before we left Canada. Kids, for my father, were like sugar—too much, and he got cranky. No, that wasn’t quite right, because we never got sick of sugar.

  Resentful as I was about the move, I was still desperate to impress him. One night, I lugged his Seagull acoustic guitar downstairs to play for him some new song I’d learned, “Stairway to Heaven” or maybe “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Dad sat down at the dining room table, a simple but flawless pine affair he’d designed and built by hand. He listened patiently while I hacked my way through the song. Then he took off his glasses, rubbed his face hard with both hands, and fixed me with a sad stare.

  “Mishka,” he said, looking deep into my eyes, “if I had it all to do over again . . . I would be the lead guitar player in a hard rock band.”

  His reaction baffled me. If he wanted to be a guitar player, why had he never learned to play the guitar he’d bought, the guitar that had sat in the closet so many years, the guitar that I had learned to play on? If he knew what he really wanted to do, why hadn’t he taken one single step to purse that dream? I turned it over and over in my mind, and over and over I came to the same conclusion: my father was pathetic.

  One day Chuong and I were kicking around in the front yard. Lon, an older kid with shiny black hair and a sharp, maniacal laugh, came by in his tiny beat-up pickup. Lon had graduated the year before but hadn’t gone to college. He and Chuong had become friends.

  “Hey,” he said, grinning, not getting out of the truck, “what are you two homos doing?”

  “What it look like, man?” Chuong said. “No-thing.”

  “Grab your bikinis and get in the truck.”

  Chuong hopped in the back.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  “Just grab some towels and get in.”

  I ran into the house and changed into my swim trunks as fast as I could. I had no idea where we were going, but I didn’t want them to leave without me. I grabbed two towels and ran back out.

  “Chuong, where’s your bikini?” Lon said when I hopped in the back.

  “Under my pants, man,” Chuong said, blowing smoke at him and grinning. “White bikini. No top.”

  Lon backed out of the driveway, then peeled out, the bald rear tires of the little truck smoking. That day he led us to the lone good thing I ever found in New Hampshire: the rope swing.

  The rest of that summer, Chuong and I went to the rope swing almost every day. We’d beg a ride from my mom, ride our bikes, or even walk the couple of miles to it. The highway wound through the woods, past a swampy finger of Powwow Pond and several houses set back from the road, to an old arched bridge spanning some railroad tracks. Walking down the railroad tracks, hopping from railroad tie to railroad tie that oozed tar and stank of creosote because the sharp rocks were hard on bare feet, you came to a tiny concrete culvert spanning a deep, brisk current connecting the two halves of Powwow Pond. To the left was the rope swing—a long cotton rope descending from the top of one scraggly pine leaning out over the water with tiny wooden steps built onto it.

  The first kid had the unenviable task of entering the water with no fanfare and swinging the rope up to the second kid, waiting at the top of the tree. For maximum swing, you jumped out to the right and the rope whipped you in a delicious arc down and around and then up, up, up, and that was where you let go, at the apogee of your trajectory. Chuong was smaller than me, but he was muscled like an acrobat. He was fearless: cannonballing headfirst, executing perfect, unlikely swan dives, doing spins and flips and backflips that terminated in tidy, poetic dives. Lon was daring and athletic, and I got better with practice, but neither of us could rival Chuong for hang time. Each of us jumped, each of us swung, each of us splashed into the water. But only Chuong had a fourth phase between the arc and the impact when time slowed to a crawl, when his wet, black hair spun off his head like spikes and the setting sun sparkled off his tightly muscled limbs, when no one was misunderstanding his broken English or making fun of his accent or kicking him out or telling him to go back to China. For a long, honeyed moment, he was flying.

  One night at the end of the summer, after my mom picked Chuong up from his dishwashing job, we crawled out his window onto the roof to smoke cigarettes. We had often stayed up late together in New Mexico, talking. Chuong told me about his mother, his brother, Chin, and his father, a convicted murderer who had abandoned them when Chuong was just eight. Occasionally, he cried. His voice didn’t quaver and his face didn’t move, but tears fell from his eyes, his only concession to sadness as he sucked on his cigarette.

  Chuong didn’t cry that night on the roof or even talk much, just stared grimly off into the night. We sat and smoked in silence. I didn’t push him. I knew he missed his family, missed his friends in Albuquerque. He hated his job. He hated New Hampshire. I knew he was getting sick of me.

  My dad found a couple of lukewarm beers in Chuong’s room. When he tried to take them, Chuong pushed him or maybe took a halfhearted swing at him. It was a big deal.

  That night, there was a serious discussion on the back deck. My father hectored Chuong. My mother defended him. Tatyana, Tashina, and I were even asked to weigh in. I was annoyed at Chuong, but only because he’d outgrown me and because we now had to sit through this whole ordeal.

  Everyone took a turn speaking except the accused. He kept his head down, never looked up, only spoke when addressed directly, and then just uttered a barely audible yes or no. Finally, my father called him out.

  “Okay, okay, enough. Everyone has spoken here except the one person we really need to hear from. Chuong, what have you got to say for yourself?”

  There was a long, pained silence. Chuong sniffed. More silence.

  “Chuong?” my dad said.

  “Don even wanna live here anymore!” Chuong blurted out, then jumped up and ran off.

  He didn’t come back that night. Or the next. Or the next.

  Finally, Chuong called my mom one day while I was at school. He had taken a bus back to Albuquerque, as my mom had guessed he would. He called her the day he arrived, as my mom had guessed he would. He wanted to tell her that he was safe, that it had been a very long ride, and “I’m sorry, Mom.” He asked her to hang on to his Vietnamese-English dictionary, that he would get it from her one day.

  I didn’t say anything to anyone at school. But each day, when I came home from class and went out to the chopping block to split and stack the wood for the woodstove for the winter, I cried.

  Chuong called me once. He wanted me to sell his leather jacket and send him the money, along with some stuff he’d left behind. I did. One letter came for me, dated September 29, 1990, in Chuong’s careful, almost feminine hand: “If you guys don’t understand, some day I’ll call you guys, ok? I don’t know what to say, well, I’m miss you guys very much. Love, Chuong.”

  We never heard from him again.r />
  That fall was a wasteland. I felt like someone had reached inside me with a pair of vise-grips and torn something out. The hole was too ragged to heal, just kept bleeding and bleeding. I was lost without Chuong. I hated him. I was sick with worry for him. And I was angry as hell.

  We’d been had. My mother had made New Hampshire seem exciting, exotic even. We’d leave the cold wars—between my mother and father, between Tatyana and me—behind. New Hampshire would be a fresh start, not just for me but for our entire family.

  It was a sham. We’d found a filthy, impoverished dump where everyone acted like they were better than us. We were as shitty to each other as we’d ever been, or worse. Now my only friend, the brother I’d never had, had been driven off. New Mexico had been hell for me, and I had been eager to escape, but New Hampshire was just a fresh hell.

  Everyone had lied to me—my mother, my father, my teachers. Life wasn’t some grand adventure, as my mother would have us believe. It was just fleeing from one shithole to the next, each one worse than the last.

  After hounding him about it all summer, Lon let me drink with him in the fall of my freshman year. He bought a couple of six-packs of Budweiser tall boys, and we lit a fire out by the railroad tracks with some of his friends. That first sixteen-ounce can felt heavy in my hand and, by extension, dangerous, like a brick or a gun. I had sipped from my dad’s beer occasionally, but having my own felt wild, exhilarating. Putting the frosty can to my lips, I drank as long and as fast as I could, relishing the grown-up, unsweet taste, the coolness pooling in my belly. Then I was laughing and stumbling, wrestling with Lon, peeing in the bushes, falling in the bushes, lying down next to the fire. This was hilarious, he was hilarious, everything was hilarious.

  When I awoke the next morning, I laid in my bed for a moment. I knew from reading what hangovers were, but I didn’t have a hangover at all. I felt great, better than great.

  What a night I’d had! Some older girl—a junior!—had put me in her car and driven me around. We had been smoking cigarettes together and listening to the radio. When I had hung my head out the window to barf, there had been two moons! Then we had been lying down together for some indeterminate time, and I had felt her up, or we had kissed or maybe just hugged? The police had been called. The police had been out looking for me!