“I mostly am, myself,” he says. “But I suspend all dietary considerations for this place. Everything’s dripping with lard.”
“What place is it?”
“It’s a little tacqueria in Mecca,” he says. “My own personal Mecca de Manteca.”
“Sounds good,” I tell him, even though I’m hesitant to replace the taste of the dates with something else. The prickly sweetness reminds me of the Korean New Year, seeing over walls.
“Oh, it’s more than good.” He grins broadly. “It’s ecstasy.”
The tacqueria is a tiny place—a kitchen with an outdoor ordering counter and four picnic tables, all filled, on a little patio glutted with plaster statues and tubs of cactus. Christmas lights twinkle from the wrought-iron fence. The air is rich with the smell of meat and grease and onions, tempered by the powdery scent of fresh tortillas. Music, heavy on the accordion and horns, crackles out from a small speaker mounted by the roof.
“They have amazing jamaica here.” Darryl points to a huge glass jar on the counter filled with garnet-colored liquid and ice cubes. Dark reddish things that look like tongues and sea anemones float around inside. The handle of a ladle hangs over the top of the jar.
“What in the world is that?” I ask.
“It’s like a punch,” he says. “It’s made out of hibiscus flowers.”
“Those things look more animal than vegetable,” I say.
“I’ll get us some,” he says. “Is there something you really want to try, or do you trust me to order for you? I know what’s really good here.”
The menu, handwritten on a dry erase board, is all in Spanish. I recognize “taco” and “burrito,” but beyond that, I’m lost. “I trust you.”
“Good,” he grins. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“I’ll go save that table,” I tell him, as a couple of men get up—day laborers, probably, bandanas loose around their necks. When my route took me to Mecca, I would often see groups of men lined up along the side of the road, waiting for people to drive up and offer them work—in the fields, on a construction site, wherever under-the-table work was needed. One of them tips his cowboy hat at me as he leaves.
Darryl comes to the table with two Styrofoam cups of jamaica. The drink is musky and sweet, like perfume that has been on someone’s body.
“That hits the spot,” he says after a long gulp. “Muy bueno.”
A woman comes to the table with a tray of food.
“Gracias,” Darryl says.
“De nada,” she tells him. She looks at me curiously. I look away until she leaves again.
The table is covered with plates, food swimming with blobs of orange oil, sour cream everywhere. Pickled carrots and jalapeños are scattered along the edges of the entrées. I can’t make sense of most of it. I pick up what appears to be a taco and take a bite. The meat, wrapped in a greasy corn tortilla, is the most tender I have ever tasted. It seems kind of like beef, but kind of not, satiny and mellow.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Lengua,” he says. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“It’s delicious.” I take another bite. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
“It’s tongue.”
I spit my mouthful of it into a napkin. “Tongue?!”
“They have tripe and sweetbreads and brains here, too, but I didn’t order them.”
I feel light-headed.
“Tongue is the best thing on the menu, Ava, honest. You said you trusted me, right?”
“I just wasn’t expecting…” But I was hoping, wasn’t I? Haven’t I imagined his tongue—the texture, the taste of it in my mouth? His tongue, not a cow tongue. I feel dizzy, but I can’t tell if it’s from disgust or desire.
“I’m sorry, Ava,” he says. “Try this—there’s no meat at all, other than the lard in the beans…” He points to what appears to be a large shoe made out of cornmeal, filled with beans and a crumbly white cheese, sprinkled with lettuce and tomato and onions.
I take a bite from the plastic fork he holds out and close my eyes. The cornmeal is chewy and satisfying, the beans are like velvet, the cheese adds the right salty bite.
“It’s a sope,” he says. “It was my wife’s favorite. There was this place in the Mission we used to go…” He trails off, misty.
“I’m so sorry, Darryl…” Those words again—they keep rising into my mouth like heartburn.
“So.” He wipes his eyes. “I’ve told you my saddest story. You tell me yours.”
I take a sip of my jamaica and practically choke on the piece of hibiscus that comes through the straw.
“Are you okay?”
I nod, my eyes tearing. I chew the flower bit, rubbery and sweet between my teeth.
“So, tell me. Who’s broken your heart?”
I don’t know where to begin. “I’ve broken my own heart, I guess.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ve never had a real relationship before,” I tell him.
He puts his hand to his heart. “You don’t strike me as someone who just fools around.”
“I’ve never really fooled around, either…” The choking tears slip into real tears. I hope he won’t notice the difference.
“Ava, are you okay?” He touches my hand.
I nod. The tears are streaming now.
“What is it?” he asks.
I can’t answer.
“Did someone do something to you?”
He must think someone molested me when I was young. I shake my head. “My mother…” I start crying so hard that I almost throw up—I can feel a petal climbing up my throat.
Darryl comes around the table and puts an arm around me. I collapse into him, sobbing. We sit like this for a long time.
“Hey, do you remember that old commercial?” He fingers a pink packet in a chipped bowl on the table as I start to calm down. “‘Wherever you go, Sweet ’N Low’?”
“I think so,” I say, my voice trembling.
“It’s like that for me, you know,” he says. “Wherever I go, Ava Sing Lo.”
I don’t know what to say.
“I can’t stop thinking about you, Ava,” he whispers into my hair.
“You don’t know anything about me.” I start to cry again.
“But I want to,” he says. “I want to know everything about you. I want to know your favorite color, I want to know what you looked like when you were a little girl, I want to know what kind of toothpaste you use and why you always smell like ginger and how you got that scar on your kneecap, and—”
“My mother was a prostitute,” I blurt out before I realize I am going to say it.
I feel like I’m going to die, or at least explode into a million pieces, but nothing happens. I’ve said the words and the world didn’t end. I feel exhilarated, like a ton of new oxygen has been pumped into my blood. I feel like now that I’ve said this, I can say anything. But I don’t. Darryl wraps me in his arms and I let my lips speak to his without any words at all.
Helen stumbled down a dirt alley, holding her stomach. Bile rose fierce in her throat; she had to keep it burning there, she had to keep moving, at least another block. The night air skimmed her face like angry sweat as she rushed past a row of small tin-roofed houses, her shirt slipping off one of her shoulders.
“Are you okay?” A man’s voice startled her. She stopped in her path. Before she could answer, Helen threw up—a white, clotty arc that hit his polished shoes.
“Come on,” he said. “You need to lie down.”
Men often said that to her, but not with the same tone of voice, not with such soft concern. Usually it was a terse command. Lie down. Or Kneel, Bend over, Stand against the wall. Like something someone would say to a dog or a naughty child. Just an hour before, Helen had been asked to squat under a table at Wild Ting and suck off five GIs, one by one, rotating between them like a windup toy beneath the cheap gum-studded particle board.
Helen threw up again, this time all over the man’s
pant leg. She hadn’t been able to hold anything down lately. Helen figured she was pregnant; she recognized the symptoms she had seen in other pregnant bar girls—the queasiness, the deep fatigue, the darkness across the bridge of the nose—plus, her period, normally so regular, was already almost two weeks late. She had started throwing up the day Sun was killed.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she could hear the man say, as he grabbed her elbow. He was pale, almost colorless, she saw as she turned her head, his hair a pelt of beige stubble, his eyes slate gray. His face was as smooth as it was white, his hands were, too. Helen cringed as he guided her through the dark walkways to a clinic, his large warm palm wrapped just beneath her bicep. She hoped no one would see her, a DMZ kijich’on with this ghost of a man.
The clinic was one she had never been to before, far different from the clinic where she checked in each week to be tested for an assortment of venereal diseases. A nurse put a check mark on the back of her identification card there, beneath the chart of her menstrual schedule, to show she was clean. She brought the card back to the club and put it in a cardboard box beneath the bar, where Knute kept the IDs handy. The last club owner, after the shiny suit man, was Madame Karen Carpenter Cher, an ex–bar girl from Pusan who never let her girls work when they had their period. The new owner, though—Knute, a squat American expatriate and ex-GI—just put the “bleeders” on extra blow job duty. “Their mouth ain’t bleeding,” he would joke to the GIs as he sent them off with their chosen orifice. When Cher was the boss, sometimes Helen stained the back of her dress with ketchup or chili sauce after her period was over, just so she could get a couple of extra days of rest, but with Knute there was no such reprieve.
The clinic the man brought Helen to was so white inside, it dazzled her eyes, made the middle of her forehead burn. She threw up again, on the man’s lap this time, as he sat next to her. He stroked her hair, and she let herself be lulled beneath his long fingers. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she could hear the man argue with the Korean women at the desk about whether or not they could treat Helen. It was a GI clinic, not some hootchy-kootchy joint you bring a date to, they said. Helen threw up another time. The man made a passionate plea, and a woman at the desk sighed and finally ushered them into the back part of the office.
Helen sat down on an examining table covered with crinkly paper, a cushy table, not like the hard wood one at the VD clinic. The man put a hand on her shoulder and lowered her down. Another white man, dressed in mint green, came and spoke with the man, who referred to Helen as his fiancée. Helen felt a needle enter her upper arm where her princess sleeve ended; the fluid inside made her whole muscle sting. She bit her lip hard, grabbed the man’s hand. He squeezed back, and she could see tears spring to his eyes. A second needle went in at her hip, where the doctor had yanked down the elastic waistband of her lilac polyester pants, her rosebud underwear. Demerol and Compazine, the doctor said to the man—one will calm her down, the other will stop the vomiting, but she’ll be sleepy, so you better take her on home to rest.
The man thanked the doctor profusely, took Helen by the arm again, led her outside. She leaned against him, barely able to stand, the drugs circling woozy through her blood.
“You’ll be okay now, you’ll be fine,” he whispered into her hair. He led her to what she supposed was his apartment and laid her down on a sofa. Before she could say a word of thanks, she fell into a dead sleep.
It was still dark when Helen woke up. She touched the blanket the man had draped over her. It was soft, like a stuffed animal splayed open. She rubbed her left hand up and down the fleecy material and tried to go back to sleep, but something felt wrong. She couldn’t move her right arm. At first Helen thought it had fallen asleep, like it often did when some GI slept in her room, the weight of his head pressed against her bicep, but she didn’t feel any tingles or pinpricks under her skin. Her whole arm seemed to contract itself into the spot the needle had gone in; her shoulder was drawn tense up to her ear. She cried out a little bit, a mewl of fear, but her voice felt strange. It was as if her tongue had grown while she slept, had filled up her mouth. When she called out, tentatively, “Help me, please, sir,” her words sounded like Regina’s, the deaf bar girl who worked at Wild Ting with her. Helen’s jaw pulled itself over to one side and wouldn’t go back. She screamed another garbled cry for help.
The man, soft with sleep, stumbled out to the couch. He flicked on a light and looked at Helen with alarm.
“I can’t talk,” she said, although the words came out without any clarity. She knew the man hadn’t heard her voice before, and she was worried he would think that was how she always spoke. She gestured to her mouth and shook her head violently. Without another word, the man scooped her up and ran her back to the clinic, in his pajamas.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, panicky, as soon as they got through the door. “She’s having some kind of seizure, her mouth is all twisted…”
“Does she have a history of this kind of episode, sir?” the woman at the desk, a different one, asked coolly, as she ruffled through some files.
“I don’t know.”
Helen shook her head.
“No,” he said. “She doesn’t. She was in here before, they gave her a shot, two shots. She was puking…”
“Is she pregnant?” the woman asked.
“No, of course not,” said the man, and Helen didn’t correct him.
“I’ll get the doctor, sir,” she said. It was a good five minutes before she came back, and during that time Helen felt like her jaw was going to crack open, to shatter apart. It felt unhinged, worse than after giving five blow jobs in a row; it felt like her lower jaw was planning on leaving the rest of her in the dust, like it was trying to break through her skin and fly away. Helen understood; she wanted to fly out of her skin herself. The first shot made her feel like she was floating for a while, but she fell asleep before she could travel very far, her friend Sun’s voice warbling in the distance.
A doctor came out a couple of minutes later, right after Helen’s jaw spasmed and she bit into her tongue. Blood filled her mouth, dripped over her lip. She had tasted her own blood slightly less than a year before when a GI punched her after she sneezed with him in her mouth, and her teeth clamped into his penis. A thin scar lay jagged on her top lip where her tooth had passed through. Madame Karen Carpenter Cher was in charge then and had let Helen rest until her mouth healed up, in her own room. If anything happened to a girl that couldn’t be covered up with makeup under Knute’s command, she was sent to the squalid Monkey House in the mountains, where they sent all the bad VD cases, until she was presentable again.
“She’s having a stroke?” the woman at the desk asked the doctor.
“I’m not stroke on him!” Helen wanted to defend herself, but she couldn’t get the words out. How could that woman think she would stroke the doctor at a time like this, although his zipper was within reach, and she could have if he asked.
“She’s having a dystonic reaction to the medicine Dr. Salinas gave her earlier today,” the doctor said to the woman, to the man who brought Helen in, to everyone but Helen. “I’m going to give her some Benadryl intravenously. We’ll keep an eye on her for a while. She’ll be fine.”
“She’s my fiancée,” the man piped up. “Can I stay with her?”
“If you want.” The doctor strode off to get the IV equipment. “Good luck,” he said under his breath.
The nurse guided the IV needle into the back of Helen’s hand; she felt herself fly out of her body with the shock of it. The Benadryl burned in, worse than the injection earlier, stinging its way down her vein, and she was sucked back into her skin. She willed herself to fall asleep as the man held her other hand, stroked the path of each vein, one by one, up to her wrist.
Later, back in the man’s apartment, Helen dozed on and off on the couch. The man—James, he finally told her—was never far from her side, bringing her juice and tea whenever her eyes opene
d.
“Will you marry me?” he asked Helen as she forced some tea down her raw throat. She had not spoken one word to him yet other than her garbled cries for help.
“What you know from me?” Helen asked. “Why you want to marry this?”
“I knew the moment I saw you,” said James, “when you threw up, it was just so white. The puke of an angel. I saw that, and I knew, yes-siree, that’s the woman for me. Everything inside of her is pure as the driven snow. Don’t find that too often round here, you know.”
“You not know me.” Helen shook her head. She considered asking him if he wanted a good time, giving him the price rundown, but she resisted.
“I’m flying to the air force base in Miramar, near San Diego, in less than a month—that’s in California, you know—and I’d like you to come with me,” James persisted, his gray eyes earnest, near tears.
You crazy boy, was all Helen could think, but then she remembered Sun’s desire to go to California. Hollywood, California, she heard Sun’s voice—Sun’s Folk Village voice, not her Wild Ting voice—ring out, full of hope. Maybe Miramar was near Hollywood, California. Helen would find it for Sun, she decided. She would get out of this place alive.
Helen soon found herself attending classes at the USO Bride School, where she learned about such things as the military lifestyle, the U.S. health care system, and how to prepare American-style breakfasts and instant pudding desserts. She found herself trying not to lock eyes with the other bar girls in the class, the ones who stirred up scrambled eggs with extra care, trying not to look coarse, trying not to arouse suspicion. She found herself throwing away her kijich’on ID. She found herself saying “I do” in the chapel. She found herself leaving all her clothes and makeup behind at Wild Ting, never to look at Knute’s ham face again. She found herself on an airplane, bound for the United States of America.
Helen couldn’t believe how her heart fluttered, like wings in her chest, when she was up in the air, flying over the ocean. All around them, newlywed couples kissed and pawed at each other. Some GIs had blankets over their laps, their wives’ heads moving underneath. James tentatively put his hand on Helen’s knee, touched her hand as if he didn’t believe she was real. She wasn’t, in a way, wasn’t there in the cramped seat next to him. She was out in the thin blue air, out in the pale wisps of cloud, where she always knew she would feel at home.
The Book of Dead Birds Page 18
