Black Hammock

by Michael Wiley

  Lexi said, ‘Why do I need to know this?’

  ‘It’s who you are,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll never love him unless you know who he was,’ I said.

  ‘Why should I love him?’ she asked. ‘He ran away. He left us here.’

  I said, ‘If you’re going to hate him, you should know who you’re hating.’ She stopped arguing, so I said, ‘Phuong’s uncle must have seen more than she and Amon thought he did, because one afternoon when Amon arrived at the store, Phuong’s father stood behind the counter with a friend. Amon knew better than to ask where Phuong was. She had told him that her father’s only politics were that he despised the Americans and the Viet Cong equally, and his only interest was in protecting his family – his wife, who had gone to live in the country, and his daughter, who had refused to leave. As Amon thumbed through the books on the plywood tables, Phuong’s father, who was as handsome as his daughter was beautiful, nudged his friend, a short man with little teeth. The friend approached Amon and asked, “What do you like?”

  ‘Amon, thinking he would break the tension, said he wanted a copy of the book that he had tried to buy on his first visit – Plum Blossom Love.

  ‘The friend showed him his little teeth and pulled a snubnose Baby Browning from a pocket. He said, “Come with me, funny man.”

  ‘Phuong’s father and his friend took Amon into a back room where there was a rusting hotplate and, for reasons Amon never figured out, a crate of tongue depressors. The friend held the gun against Amon while Phuong’s father talked. The father said, “Because my daughter loves you, I give you a chance. One. You go away. You will not see my daughter any more. This is your chance.” He looked at Amon hopefully.

  ‘Amon asked, “What happens if I don’t go away?”

  ‘Phuong’s father said, “What happens? I have a gun. Many guns. I buy guns. I sell guns. You want to buy or sell guns – that is good. You want to be with my daughter – that is bad.”

  ‘“I love Phuong,” Amon said.

  ‘“No,” her father said. “You do not love Phuong. No more. You go.”

  ‘The friend crammed the snubnose into Amon’s ribs.

  ‘“Fine,” Amon said. “I go.”

  ‘He left, and after that he and Phuong were careful. They met in the apartment that Amon rented or at hotels in parts of the city that they believed were safe from her father and her father’s friends.

  ‘Then,’ I said, ‘Phuong got pregnant.’

  ‘Wait,’ Lexi said. ‘My dad had a kid in Vietnam?’

  ‘Just listen,’ I said. ‘When Phuong’s father found out, he threatened to kill her. He threatened to castrate Amon. He went to the gates of the Bien Hoa military base and threatened to shoot himself if the sentries didn’t turn Amon over to him. Phuong left the city and hid with her mother. Now Amon saw her only once every month or two, when he had enough leave time to travel into the countryside, and on each visit Phuong’s belly swelled and the skin tightened until it seemed they would need a knife or a razor to relieve the tension.

  ‘They had a daughter,’ I said, ‘and they named her Lang. Even—’

  Lexi said, ‘I have a sister? That’s ridiculous.’

  I said, ‘Even at a glance, it was clear from the baby’s skin, her face, and her brown hair that she was Amerasian. That was bad for family peace. When Phuong’s mother showed her husband a picture of the baby to try to reconcile him to reality, he just added Lang to his list of people to kill. They kept the baby and Phuong out of sight when he visited. Phuong’s mother learned to avoid even mentioning them in his presence, treating them as if they were – as he wished to think them – dead. But one day during the next monsoon season he arrived unexpectedly at the country house and found the baby alone. In one of those moments that should lead to happy endings, he looked at the child and his anger seemed to break inside him. He stood, stunned, alone with this baby whose eyes and face were at once so familiar and so foreign, and then he went to Lang, picked her up, and held her to his chest. When Phuong’s mother came into the room, she thought that he was suffocating the child, but then she saw tears on his handsome face.’

  ‘Nice,’ Lexi said.

  ‘Only a little,’ I said. ‘After that first moment of amazement, life became complicated in the family again. Phuong’s father still struggled with the fact that Amon was an American. He blamed him – as he blamed all Americans – for bringing death to Vietnam. He still struggled with the knowledge that Phuong had betrayed him, humiliated him in his own eyes and, he was certain, the eyes of both those who had respected him and those who were happy to see weakness in him.

  ‘But Phuong returned to Saigon and worked in her father’s store once more. In the evenings she would go to the apartment that Amon had rented, and, whenever he could, Amon would spend a few hours or a night with her. Because of their fears of another attack by the Viet Cong, they left Lang in the country with Phuong’s mother, but each month, on a weekend when Phuong’s father remained in Saigon, Phuong and Amon went to the country house and lived for two or three days as a family.

  ‘Never in his life had Amon been happier. Never had he felt more at home than in this place nine thousand miles from where he grew up. He re-enlisted after his twelve months ended, then re-enlisted twice more. As the United States drew down some of our troops from South Vietnam in nineteen-seventy-three, he arranged to move Phuong and their daughter with him when his fourth tour ended. But those plans reignited the anger that had always smoldered in Phuong’s father.’

  Outside, Jimmy’s motorcycle droned and droned as it circled and circled the house.

  Lexi asked, ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  I said, ‘I want you to know what you lost.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but why?’

  I thought, Because it hurts too much to hurt alone. I said, ‘Two weeks before Amon was scheduled to fly out of Saigon, to be followed by Phuong and their three-year-old daughter, he was alone in the rental apartment, packing the few belongings he would take with him, when there was a soft knock.

  ‘When he opened the door, Lang was standing outside alone. She was wearing a red dress that Phuong had sewed for her third birthday and that already looked too short because the girl was growing so fast. Now her brown hair had been roughly cut off. Strands of the cut hair clung to her dress and to the little red socks that peaked out of her shiny black shoes. She had her hands behind her back as if holding a secret gift, and, despite the violence that had been committed against her hair, she looked excited to see her dad. Amon stared at her, confused. She was supposed to be at the country house with her grandmother. Even if there had been a change in plans, there was no reason for her to be here alone, wearing her best dress, and with her hair tattered.

  ‘But Amon stooped low to hug her and said, “Come here, baby.”

  ‘Lang went to him, but as she exposed her hands he saw that she had in fact brought a gift. She held – like it was a doll – an M-twenty-six fragmentation grenade, its safety pin-ring removed. At the Bien Hoa base he had heard drunk soldiers laughing as they’d described the damage the grenades had done to the Viet Cong, and later, after they’d sobered up, he had heard them crying as they’d described the same damage.

  ‘Amon rolled backward on to the floor, skittering away from his daughter.

  ‘She giggled at the game he seemed to be playing.

  ‘He asked, “Where did you get that?”

  ‘She held up the grenade as if it was as harmless as a lemon. “Ông nôi,” she said – “grandpa” – like that was part of the wonderful surprise. She presented it to him then, as her grandpa must have told her to, setting it on the floor between them, admiring it, and running to Amon.

  ‘He pulled her to himself so tight he knew that she couldn’t breathe. He wished that he could pull her into his own skin. He never could explain what he did next. Maybe he panicked. Maybe the anger and fear he’d felt when his f
ather killed his mother had broken something inside him. Maybe he acted according to the warped logic of instinct. Maybe – and this was the thought that haunted him most – he was, as his father had thought he was, a coward. But he threw Lang down on the grenade and fell on top of her. It was an insane act at an insane moment in an insane part of the world. The explosion ripped through the girl and lifted them both into the air. For what seemed a long time, Amon felt that he was flying – hovering in the air in the middle of the apartment, a spray of blood, skin, and bone hanging in the air with him, his daughter’s red dress seeming to drift on a brown wind – and then he fell to the floor, torn and lacerated by shrapnel that had passed through Lang’s body and into his own.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Lexi

  ‘You asshole,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Edgar Allan said. Or Oren. This man who called himself Oren. ‘He did.’

  ‘I’ve never heard any of this,’ I said.

  ‘How much has your mother told you about him?’ he asked. ‘Other than calling him a bastard.’

  I didn’t answer.

  He asked again, ‘How much?’

  ‘I told you. Almost nothing.’

  He said, ‘So do you want to hear or not?’

  I didn’t know. ‘Does it get worse?’

  ‘It has its ups and downs,’ he said.

  ‘My dad told you all of this?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘When?’ I asked. ‘Where?’

  He said, ‘I’ll tell you everything if you want to hear.’

  The wooden roof beams in the attic ticked as the night cooled outside. The voices of the people in the yard had fallen to a murmur. A motorcycle circled the house. And circled. The generator in the back of the yellow pickup hummed. Stuttered. Hummed again. One of the German shepherds barked. A light glowed outside the vent at one end of the attic where the floodlights shined at the house. I listened for Mom or Walter or Cristofer. Heard nothing.

  ‘Tell it,’ I said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Oren

  ‘Good choice,’ I said.

  ‘Or not,’ Lexi said.

  ‘Amon spent two months in the military hospital,’ I said. ‘The doctors removed part of his intestines. They had to fight down a lung infection. But the biggest problems, as you might expect, were in his head. The nightmares – where he relived Lang’s arrival at his door, her happiness as she gave him the live grenade, his impulse to throw her on to it, the minutes that he seemed to float above the apartment floor after the explosion – got worse and shaded into daytime hallucinations when he learned that the Vietnamese police were refusing to charge Phuong’s father. The man had spared his wife and Phuong, and the only witness who could say that he sent Lang to the apartment had been Lang herself, a three-year-old who now was dead. The police said that Amon’s claim that Lang had told him that her ông nôi had given her the grenade was suspicious. Since the M-twenty-six was American ordnance, they thought that Amon more likely had brought it to the apartment himself.

  ‘“Mr Phan is a peaceful man,” the police said. “He operates a bookstore.”

  ‘Amon told them, “He’s a black-marketer.”

  ‘“These are difficult times,” they said.

  ‘Amon said, “Search his store. Search his house. He buys and sells guns. You’ll find grenades—”

  ‘“Go home, Yankee,” they said, “or we will charge you with your daughter’s death.”

  ‘He boarded the transport plane, leaving the antiseptic smells of the hospital and the salty sewage and rotting vegetation of the city behind. Back in America, waiting for his discharge, he wrote letter after letter to Phuong. He told her about his healing injuries, his worsening nightmares, the American food he was eating. He told her about Waycross, where he would return as soon as he received his papers and where they could build a life together in the house where he grew up. Aside from the descriptions of his nightmares, he never mentioned Lang. That pain was too deep. The pain and the guilt were. The closest he came to mentioning her was when he wrote, I want a big family. When you come, we’ll have children. He asked her when she was coming.’

  Lexi said, ‘This is screwed-up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Phuong never answered the letters. Did her father intercept them? Did she decide on her own that she couldn’t face the pain of being with Amon? Amon never knew.

  ‘When the army discharged him, he went to Waycross and on his first night back in his childhood house he realized that he didn’t want to be the person he’d been in the past. When he came through the front door, unopened during the four years since he enlisted, he scuffed a path through the dust, and in the morning he scuffed back out, went to a realty office, told a broker he wanted to sell the house at a price that would move it fast, then checked into a motel east of town.

  ‘Six days later, he drove toward the coast, with a bank draft in his pocket and his car trunk loaded with his favorite books. When he reached the Atlantic, he turned right and headed south past the chain of outer-bank islands. He wanted to find a place where nothing would remind him of the man he had been. He expected he would find such a place in the Florida Keys, but just after crossing the Georgia–Florida border he tried an unpaved road that wound over old, blown sand dunes and through a pine forest that was being cultivated by a paper mill. The road ended at the bridge to Black Hammock Island. A tropical storm had washed out most of the bridge. You could walk across it, but cars and trucks were prohibited. Amon parked his car and walked across, waving aside a curtain of yellow flies. He walked until he saw a sign – For Sale by Owner – advertising an up-island plot of three acres, two of them marsh. The place was about as isolated as you could stumble on to in the Southeast without swimming or hiring a boat. Amon had found a new home.’

  Outside, the generator stuttered and hummed.

  ‘For thirteen years,’ I said, ‘Amon lived alone, speaking to others only when necessary, which on an island like Black Hammock was seldom. He paid a company to dig a well but built his own house from lumber that a flatbed truck delivered after the bridge was repaired. He fished in the tidal waters and grew vegetables in a garden that he planted between the marsh and his back door. In the first sign that he had succeeded in forgetting the boy he once had been – the one who had refused to shoot a deer and had managed to make love not war even when he was in the middle of the hottest conflict since the end of World War Two – he started buying guns. At first he bought a pistol and a rifle to scare away the raccoons that raided his garden and dug up the kitchen scraps that he buried in the yard. Then he bought another rifle and a shotgun to shoot squirrels and birds when the fish weren’t biting. Then he bought more and more guns just because he could.

  ‘Soon, a neighbor accused him of stealing and slaughtering a hog. Although the police dropped the charges, Amon developed a reputation on the island as a man not to be trusted and, after a second incident, involving a goat, as a man who lived by knife and gun.’

  Lexi said, ‘I’ve heard some of this before.’

  ‘Yes, we’re getting close to home,’ I said. ‘Around the time of the goat incident, Amon realized the house that he had built with his own hands was rotting. The planks he had used for siding felt damp and soft even in dry weather. Rats had chewed a hole under the eaves and were living in his roof. Insects were eating their way up from the wooden foundation and had bored into the floor.

  ‘Amon knew that the other islanders painted their roofs and outside walls with pine tar, though until his own house started to fall down, he hadn’t understood why. Now, he could let his house disintegrate and disappear into the sand and dirt, a prospect that also had attractions for him, or he could do as his neighbors did. After about a month of indecision, he visited a family that was famous for making tar – out of a mix of sand pine, slash pine, and longleaf pine, with some loblolly mixed in.’

  ‘Ah,’ Lexi said.

  ‘Yes, Ah,’ I said. ‘Amon told the
man who made the tar – a man named Henry Jakobson—’

  ‘My grandfather,’ Lexi said.

  ‘Yes, your grandfather, who, it’s said, along with his yardman – an often underestimated man named Tilson – made the richest, smoothest tar in the Southeast. Amon told your grandfather what was happening, and your grandfather sold him ten gallons of tar, enough to coat the house twice. That would have ended the encounter, except that a teenaged girl was sitting on the front porch.’

  ‘My mom?’ Lexi asked.

  ‘She was just fifteen and Amon was thirty-five,’ I said. ‘She was heavy-boned and had acne, and she also used a pair of scissors to cut herself, sometimes on the hands and arms, more often on her face.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lexi said.

  ‘Few would have called her beautiful,’ I said. ‘That would come later. She was a strange girl. She watched the world wide-eyed, as if it held no danger for her, and on the morning that Amon visited she had drawn a line of tar down each cheek, here’ – I touched Lexi’s face and drew a line down from her left eye – ‘and here’ – I drew a line down from her right eye. Lexi pulled away into the dark.