She had been meaning to ask her mother, who was aware that she had secreted away the machete, if she could check to see if it were still there, but Mai was working a late shift at the nursing home tonight. Dot could have waited for another day, of course...but the image of the machete was becoming sharper and sharper in her mind with each passing second. She had to see it. Touch it. Reassure herself that it was still safely hidden away.
There was the bureau now, hunching like a troll in the shadow of a corner, blocked by an old set of weights her father had once purchased in a futile attempt to bulk up his almost delicate body. Dot crept around and over the intervening detritus of the past, until she reached the old chest of drawers. Its top was piled with obsolete record albums, mostly her own, which seemed far older than they could actually be. She was surprised her father hadn’t dumped them long ago. Maybe he intended to mail them off to relatives in Vietnam (as he had so many of her belongings whether she had outgrown them or not), but simply hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
Partly out of curiosity, and partly to stall, Dot peeked in the top drawer of the bureau. A bundle of letters her mother had received from some relative of her own in Vietnam. A number of Disney videotapes of Dot’s; again, she was surprised her father hadn’t shipped them away or simply trashed them. She was going to poke around in the next drawers, but decided to put off her mission no longer. Bracing her small body against the end of the bureau, Dot began pushing it across the cement floor.
Its legs resisted against the floor’s rough surface. She had to give an extra hard push, and suddenly the bureau moved in a wide arc. A noisy arc. Though it had been silent upstairs after the flushing of the toilet, she imagined it suddenly grew more silent.
But that was not what gripped her in a dismay so great it was almost horror.
There was no machete under the bureau.
Despite the noise she had made before, Dot gave the bureau another hard shove, something like panic replacing her previous stealth. The bureau thumped up against the old weight-lifting bench, exposing the rest of the floor it had been covering. In that dusty spot there was a reddish kind of stain. She thought it was blood, at first, but then realized it had to be rust. And lying atop that stain: this time the machete was exposed, after all. Its blade spotted with the corrosion of its long wait, the bladed instrument spun lazily like the hand of a clock, having been struck by one leg of the bureau.
Then, feet scurrying down the solid wooden stairs. Swears, before she even saw her father’s head come into view. At the last second, Dot lunged forward and pushed the machete under the weight-lifting bench with her toe – and then her father was there. He had a kitchen knife clenched in one fist, a big one her mother used to prepare food, and Dot tried not to cry out as she backed herself against the displaced bureau.
“Ah! Fuck you!” her father ranted in Vietnamese. “Bitch! Bitch! Look at you – I thought you were a ghost! What are you doing down here?”
“It’s just me,” Dot tried to joke, “not a ghost. Not a robber.” She held up her empty palms.
“What are you dressed like that for? Stupid bitch! You’re not Japanese.” He gestured at her with the knife. “People will think you’re crazy! Stupid Americans don’t know Vietnamese from Japanese already, without you dressing like a fool!”
Dot got most of what he was saying, despite the rapidity of his speech. All she could think to say in her defense, however, was, “Halloween. I...came here to get something to add to my costume.”
She saw his eyes drop to the floor behind her. The spot of floor exposed by the bureau. She wanted to look toward it herself, to see if the machete could be seen close by in the shadow of the weight-lifter’s bench, but prayed that the boxes stacked on the floor would help to obscure it.
She had been so afraid, almost certain, that he had found it since she had moved out of the house – and that he had simply forgotten, since chancing upon it, to berate her for having hidden it from him all those years ago.
“Don’t make a mess in here!” he snapped at her, obviously not having spotted the tool. “This isn’t your house anymore!”
“Sorry, ba. I’ll put everything back the way I found it...”
He made a sound like “bah” himself, but with a different meaning, and pounded back up the basement stairs, the knife still in his fist. At last, Dot lowered her warding hands. In a muffled voice above her, she heard the words, “Stupid bitch!” in English this time.
Dot stood motionless for a short while, during which a poisonous self-loathing welled up inside her. The flutter of her heartbeat inspired this contempt, because it was fear that had inspired her heart to flutter. She was twenty years old, and she still feared him. She could spike her hair, wear the surliest goth-like clothing, listen to the angriest music, and still he could make her feel five years old again. The next time he yelled at her, cursed at her like that, she’d tell him to go to hell. She swore it. She’d tell him to just fuck himself.
She turned her attention to pushing the bureau back in place, trying not to make any noise this time, only so she wouldn’t attract him down here again, only because she couldn’t stand to see his hate-stamped face. Once, when she was thirteen, she and a neighborhood boyfriend-of-sorts had been firing his BB gun in her fenced backyard. Her father had come out and barked at her in Vietnamese to send the boy home. His face then had looked exactly as it had just now. As soon as the boy had left her yard, her father swung a blow at Dot’s head. She had turned her head and caught the impact on the back of her skull instead of across the face. It had been more of a punch than a slap. Her father had then stormed back inside, and watching him go, Dot had wished she still had her friend’s rifle in her hands, so she could raise it and point it at the shining blackness of the back of his hate-filled head. Would one small BB be enough to pop it like a balloon, a piñata, to let out a swirling tornado of hatred like Pandora’s box?
Dot stooped for the machete, picked it up. Its weight was too balanced, too perfect, a peasant man’s Excalibur. The implement seemed to have a living presence of its own: a crude but ancient elemental spirit trapped in ore, molded into this weapon, with an alluring voice which invited her to raise it. To swing it. Instead, Dot hid the machete under her kimono, hoping she wouldn’t drop it and impale her foot, or cut her thigh on that oxidized but still mean edge.
She stole upstairs and toward the back door as quietly as she could...dreading all the way that her father would reappear. Would see her walking oddly, one hand pressed to her leg as if she had indeed been injured. But he didn’t reappear. On TV, from the living room, she could hear a chainsaw revving and a woman screaming. It was Halloween.
14: Grim Reaper
The sun set quickly, eager for the festivities to begin, and there was a crescent moon to take its place. Lee glanced up at it as he drove back into the city, on his way to meet Mai for coffee at the café on Front Street where they had gone for coffee recently. She would be taking a break from the second shift she was working tonight at the Hawthorne Nursing Home. He could have met her at the nursing home itself, but since his mother had died within its walls, even seeing the building from the outside squeezed his heart like a ball of cold clay.
At a stoplight, he watched as a tiny blinking plane flew directly across the crescent moon. It looked like the moon had exploded, leaving only this bright comma, and the plane was one of its glittering fragments. Would the rest of that ruined globe, pulverized to dust, drift down tonight onto the roofs of houses, swept into these dwellings with the trick-or-treaters, to be inhaled, ingested, to pollute or poison or to plant seeds of dream?
Lee parked down the street, then walked toward the coffee shop. At the last minute he had decided on having a bit of fun. While rummaging in the basement he had found an old costume, a satiny black robe with a cowl which he now pulled up over the top of his head. At a drugstore along the way he had popped in to purchase one of the few masks remaining, a grinning skull. Perfect. He was the Grim Reaper
– or the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he thought, visiting the mortal realm a bit prematurely. He wouldn’t take off his mask until after Mai had already come in (she was perpetually late, so he didn’t expect her to arrive before him), until he had seen her looking around for him...then he would approach her and unveil himself.
As it turned out, however, Lee saw Mai walking up to the coffee shop as he turned the corner...so he broke into a run to catch up with her. He let out a warbling falsetto wail, and she turned to see him fluttering at her, wing-like arms spread, skull leering. At the last moment she stepped back but he clasped hold of her tightly, lifted her off the ground. She let out a cry and Lee was afraid she’d kick him, pull a pinned arm free and tear at his face, so he let her down and tore his face away himself, the skull on the outside and the flesh beneath in a magical reversal.
“You!” she barked.
“Me,” he laughed. “Sorry, baby.” She swatted him. “Ow! Sorry!”
“You crazy!”
“Crazy for you.” He kissed her cheek, then leaned back and appraised her. “Nice costume. Dressed up as a nurse. Sexy. I’d like to see you wear white stockings, though. Nothing but white stockings...”
She swatted him again, but a smile spread across her face and she slipped her arm around him. Patted his bottom through his robe. His arm encircling her now, too, they squeezed themselves side-by-side through the entrance of the coffee shop.
There was a lower level of the shop with scattered tables, and an elevated level with the service counter itself and more tables. The work of local artists hung on the brick walls; today, they were mixed media sculptures with an industrial feel, looking like complex machinery built directly into the walls, something that generated the shop’s coffee-making devices, or which manufactured and exhaled into the night the energies permeating this strange, pagan holiday.
At one of the tables on the lower level, close to the door, sat two Asian men. The men saw Lee and Mai come in with their arms around each other, Lee tall and black-garbed like some kind of cleric, Mai small and in the white uniform of a healer. Lee saw recognition in the eyes of both men. He knew this recognition was reflected in his own eyes, and in those of Mai...even though he himself had only seen Trang in several photographs, before this moment.
Lee and Mai froze for a moment, only steps away from the table at which Mai’s husband sat with some friend, coffees before them. Then Lee saw Mai’s face set itself coldly, and she turned back toward the door, her arm around Lee guiding his movements.
Barked words in Vietnamese stopped them both; they half turned around again. Mai answered him, her words just as clipped. The man responded. He pointed at Lee. Lee let his arm drift away from Mai’s waist, but she didn’t remove her own from around his.
“Let’s go, honey,” he whispered. But Mai was retorting, raising her voice higher, her tone becoming more excitable. Then, perhaps for Lee’s benefit, her words tumbled over into English. “I told you. I told you I would find another man if you treat me so bad...”
“Honey,” Lee repeated.
“You said go ahead, who cares, whatever – remember that? You remember? You said that to me. All these years I so lonely. You never hug me, you never let me hug you. You never say thank you when I cook for you...you let me work and work and work so much overtime while you watch TV...”
“Bitch!” her husband hissed. Lee thought he could see muscles lacing themselves tightly in Trang’s neck and jaw. She had told Lee that in public her husband was almost excruciatingly shy, desperate not to be seen or heard or embarrassed. The effort to control himself was making him look like he was strapped into that chair, with a killing electric current flowing through him.
“You hit our daughter so many times...you lucky I didn’t have you arrested! When she old enough I pushed her out of the house, I pushed her, to get her away from you...”
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” Trang chanted in a half choke, half whisper.
“Look at you with your friend, always with some guy. You’re like a gay, you know that? Not like sex with the gay, but you only want a wife to be a slave for you. All the time we ate at the table you never talked to me, never, but here you can talk with this guy or that guy all night long with no problem, huh? It is, isn’t it? It’s like you a gay...”
“Mai,” Lee said more loudly, taking her arm and urging her toward the door.
“Get out, bitch,” Trang growled. “Get out...get out...”
“I will get out – okay? You want me out? That’s good...I like to hear that. I will get out. I will.” Now it was she tugging Lee toward the door. “Come on, honey,” she said. In the threshold, though, she looked back at her husband and snapped, “And fuck you, too.”
“Jesus Christ, honey,” Lee said as they whisked themselves off down the sidewalk, two demented trick-or-treaters on their way to shock some other unwary victim.
“I’m sick of that guy,” she seethed.
“I’m sorry we came here, Mai. Did you know he goes in there with his friend?”
“I forgot. I never go with him. Anyway, I don’t care...”
“You shouldn’t have said what you said. I know you got caught on the defensive, but you...”
She glared up at him, her beautiful eyes turned frightening, like those of an increasingly rare tiger from her country’s dense forests. “What afraid for? I told you, I had enough of that guy.” But he heard her voice shaking with more than fury. He knew she hadn’t been prepared for this encounter...not just yet...not this night.
“I just don’t want him to hurt you.”
“Won’t hurt me. Coward.”
“You embarrassed him in front of his friend. In public. I’m not saying he didn’t deserve what you said, believe me, but...”
She cut him off again. “Okay, I sleep at my daughter’s house tonight.”
“That might be a good idea.” In a way, this night was what Lee had been waiting for, but had been afraid Mai would never work up the courage to achieve. And yet now that she had defied her husband, and had not denied her lover, he still felt a great anxiety that she had done so.
“I call her on cell phone when we get in car...let her know.”
Three small, more conventional trick-or-treaters rushed up the sidewalk, causing Lee and Mai to separate to let them blow between them, giggling. Lee looked over his shoulder after them, and saw a figure on the street corner watching him. The night’s mild breeze caused the figure’s costume of frayed strands to lift on the air, and headlights passing behind it showed that the mummer wore a twisted or bent cap like that of a court jester, perhaps. The figure was distressingly familiar, and Lee was about to resist Mai’s forward propulsion and turn toward it more squarely – defiantly – but when he glanced back a second time as he stumbled along the masquerader was gone...leaving only a small, swirling eddy of autumn leaves and the boundless juggernaut of night in its wake.
15: Monster Fest
Though her shift had barely started, Dot left work at The Pier directly after receiving her mother’s call, despite the disapproval and threats of her boss Anoush. She arrived at the house where she rented a second floor apartment and noted that her mother hadn’t yet arrived. Mai hadn’t told her much, but enough to cause Dot worry. Just the fact alone that her mother wanted to spend the night with her made her anxious for Mai to reach her apartment soon, and safely.
On her kitchen table, Dot set down the rubber severed head she had been carrying around (again, with Anoush’s disapproval), the plastic samurai sword, and the machete she had inexplicably stolen from her father’s home late in the afternoon. For a moment she stared at the rusty blade, afraid to even touch its surface, as if she might contract lockjaw from its scaly poison.
While she waited, Dot lit a fresh candle in her jack-o’-lantern and put on her CD of music by Joakim Back, in an attempt to keep the pervasive mystique of All Hallows’ Eve – nostalgic to the point of gorgeous melancholy – from being extinguished altogether. S
he paced the kitchen in her kimono and shiny wig, gnawing at the skin around a fingernail.
From his car, parked behind Mai’s in front of the house where her daughter rented her apartment, Lee tilted his head to gaze up at those warm yellow windows outlined against the night’s dark. He could see the fluttering, almost liquid light of a candle. “Should I come up?” he asked, hopeful but not wanting to push it. He wasn’t so selfish or shallow to think that he might sleep over, too, and thus spend the night under the covers with his lover...it was simply that he thought she might benefit from his companionship, shaken as she obviously was.
Leaning in his window, Mai kissed his cheek. “No. I don’t want you meet my daughter this way. I want it to be happy. I just want to sleep, honey. Talk with her a little, and go to bed early.” Mai had not returned to the nursing home from her coffee break, had called her own boss on her cell phone to report that she had a family crisis. Mai had told Lee that her boss hadn’t sounded at all happy (a lot of mothers had taken Halloween night off to trick-or-treat with their children), but with all the flexible hours and overtime she put in, Mai didn’t think her supervisor had a legitimate cause to complain.
“You just need to calm down, baby,” he told her. “Tell Dot to take her phone off the hook so Asshole can’t harass you...”
“I will,” Mai said.
“...and then you two make some popcorn, get under a blanket on the couch and watch MonsterFest, on American Movie Classics.” He gave her an endorsing thumb’s up sign.
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