The Gangster We Are All Looking For

by Le Thi Diem Thuy

  I told the glass animals about a picture of the boat that my Ba and the four uncles and I had escaped on. The picture was taken by someone standing on the deck of the ship that had picked us up. I don’t know who took the picture or how one of the uncles came to have it. In the picture, our boat looks like a toy boat floating in a big bowl of water. There are little people standing in the boat. We are among the people in the picture but I can’t tell who is who because we are all so small. Small faces, small heads, small arms reaching out to touch small hands. Maybe the Americans on the ship were laughing at us. Maybe that’s why it took them so long to lower the ladder. Maybe they laughed so hard at the sight of us so small, they started to roll around the deck like spilled marbles and they had to help one another to their feet and recall their own names—Emmett, Mike, Ron—and where they were from—Oakland, California; Youngstown, Ohio; Shinston, West Virginia—before they could let us climb up and say our names—Lan, Cuong, Hoang—and where we were from—Phan Thiet, Binh Thuan.

  It didn’t matter what I told them. The story could take place in the courtyard of our house in Vietnam or on the deck of the Navy ship that picked us up from the sea or in a hammock at the refugee camp in Singapore or in the belly of the airplane that carried us to California; it could take place in the heat of midday or in the cool of the evening or in the strange weather of one of my Ba’s nightmares; it could smell of fish sauce or of hamburgers or of jasmine; it could be a description of a dream I had or a dog I saw or a boy I missed; it could be about the way my mother’s hair smelled warm at night or the way the playground slide felt cold in the morning or the way the grass in the back garden tickled my ankles; it could be about how everything that happened to my Ba and the four uncles and me, happened “Suddenly,” “Many years ago,” and “Somewhere far away”—as in those fairy tales that the teacher read to the class every Friday.

  The glass animals didn’t blink. They didn’t laugh. They never raised an eyebrow or tilted their heads as they listened. They didn’t nod in agreement or stomp the ground to object. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t seem to want to know anything. I got tired of talking to them and I sensed that if I kept them in the sun too long, they might shatter.

  I would stretch the hem of my T-shirt out and lift the glass animals off the ledge, placing them one by one into the sail of my shirt. I could feel their skinny legs poking me through the cloth as I carried them back to the cabinet. I’d line the animals up tall, short, tall, just as Mel’s mother had lined them up originally for Mel. I closed the glass doors of the display cabinet with the glass animals staring ahead. They didn’t remember me. When I hid in the small space between the cabinet and the wall, they never turned their heads or pressed their faces against the glass doors of the cabinet to look for me. The uncles were unaware that it wasn’t the butterfly but rather these glass animals that had no soul.

  The butterfly sat in my shirt pocket, pressing against my body as I walked around Mel’s office. I liked the weight of the butterfly. I liked it the way I liked standing in the back garden with my hands in my pockets and my eyes closed as I slowly turned my face toward the sun. The color of the butterfly when I held it up to the light was like the taste of the sun on those days when I stood in the back garden sticking my tongue out.

  One Friday afternoon in December, a week before Christmas vacation, I tried to free the butterfly. The result was Mel told Ba, the four uncles and me to pack our things and get out. Ba said it wasn’t my fault; it wasn’t anybody’s fault. Ba said these things happen.

  On that day, I told the glass animals about a dream I’d had the night before. In it, I’d stolen one of the school crossing guards’ signs and carried it back to Mel’s house. I dragged the sign down the long hallway and stood it up like the mast of a ship. My Ba and the four uncles were asleep. I woke them and told them to climb onto the sign. I tied them to the signpost so they wouldn’t fall off and as they waited for me, I ran from room to room, turning on all the faucets in the house.

  I told the glass animals that the rushing water in the dream lifted my Ba, the four uncles and me out of the house, down the five steps, into the street, past the school and the uncles’ pool hall, beyond the rows of identical apartment buildings, each with its rooms glowing white. As we sailed through the streets on our sign, I held the glass disk like a telescope up to my eye and through the body of my butterfly, I saw Ma standing on a faraway beach.

  The glass animals listened patiently but had no opinions about my dream. I picked them up from the windowsill and carried them back to the display cabinet. I closed the cabinet and climbed onto Mel’s leather swivel chair, twirling myself around and around. I spun myself dizzy trying to remember what Ma’s face looked like in my dream and trying to think of a way to get my butterfly out of its glass disk.

  When the chair stopped spinning, I noticed some broken glass on the bottom shelf of a bookcase near the display cabinet. I climbed down from the swivel chair and walked over to the bookcase. The butterfly was in my T-shirt pocket; it pulled down my shirt as I crouched to study the broken glass.

  It was a picture frame. The glass of the frame was shattered but the picture beneath it looked untouched. Smiling up through the broken glass was a young Mel and his young mother. They had their arms around each other in that sort of tight embrace that made me feel it was hard to breathe. But they seemed to like it. Their noses were pink and shiny. The old woman’s teeth were bright then and incredibly even. Mel’s curls glowed in the sun. Mel and his mother looked very well to me.

  Like my Ba and me, Mel and his mother stood in a snowy place, leaning against a blue car. A shadow was thrown across the snow. It must have belonged to the person taking the picture.

  My eyes glanced up at the pipe in the glass cabinet. It lay on its side, the bits of tobacco still stuffed in its bowl.

  I stood up from the picture and looked around the room. The room felt crowded. Messy stacks of paper were crammed into the shelves. Half-empty boxes of books lay at odd angles on the floor, having been pushed one way and then another as Mel made his way around. Empty boxes stood on end.

  My eyes scanned the four walls of Mel’s office before settling on the space between the glass display cabinet and the wall near the door. I walked up to the space and measured it with my hands, pressing first one palm and then the other flat against the wall.

  Keeping my eye on the space, I backed away from the wall until I was standing beside the desk at the center of the room. I took the disk from my shirt pocket and cupped it in one hand. I rocked it a little, feeling its weight in my palm.

  The butterfly lay in the disk. It was motionless, like someone expert at holding his breath or playing dead.

  I held the disk up to my ear and listened. My heart was beating and wouldn’t be quiet. I held the disk at arm’s length, shook my head, and then brought the disk back to my ear.

  There, very faintly, was the sound. It was like a light, almost transparent, curtain rippling across a window.

  I tightened my fingers around the glass disk, swung my arm as far back as it would go, and, aiming for the center of that small space—a space the width of three hands—I skipped once and swung my arm forward, letting the disk fly.

  The disk flew hard and fast, but not where I had sent it. It crashed through the glass doors of the display cabinet. The animals’ knees buckled. As they fell, some of the animals lost their heads while others’ bodies broke in two. The broken bodies of some protected the bodies of others from shattering completely. Some lay on their sides, staring out the window.

  The disk hit the back of the cabinet, bouncing off the china before shooting back out into the room. Mel’s office filled with the sounds that animals make.

  Ba and the uncles threw open the door.

  I spun in the chair, my eyes scanning the ceiling for the butterfly.

  “Shuh-shuh/shuh-shuh.”

  “Suh-top! /suh-top!”

  “Shuh-shuh/shuh-shuh.”

&n
bsp; “Suh-top!”

  palm

  The trees in the neighborhood were palms and eucalyptus. Along the sides of many of the houses were bushes of white jasmine that bloomed in the evening. Young girls picked the flowers and, with a thread and needle, strung the blooms into garlands. They made themselves crowns and necklaces and bracelets. If allowed to, they would wear the flowers to bed. By morning, the garlands lay crushed and spent, the white having aged to yellow, but the fragrance remained across every throat and wrist and crown that had worn them.

  During the day, the sun beat down hard on those streets, warping the sensations, muting the sight and sound and feel of everything. The chants of children skipping rope in the alley beneath an open window seemed to come from miles away. And the sound the rope made, as it brushed against the ground, was like that of a broom sweeping a courtyard—in another country. A couple fighting in an apartment across the way moved from room to room, from window to window, fighting the fight they would always be fighting, in which no one would ever be hurt. Nothing was urgent. You could pick up a ripe mango from the kitchen table and hold it to your nose. In the heat its scent would mingle with all the others: the sweat of children running; incense burning on the altar; clean clothes drying on the line; apples and oranges quartered and offered, without any fuss, to both the dead and the living.

  In the shade of the evening, as you looked over the second-floor railing into the swimming pool below, the shapes of things that had happened would slowly take form and come into focus. The day would return to you, and with it, like a school of fish, all the other days. You could lean against the railing then and watch, with wonder, as the people, places, and objects from all the days gathered. In your mind’s eye, they would glide and flicker, making their way across the darkening face of the swimming pool before, one by one, they would rise from the water and scale the air approaching where you stood leaning far over the rail, holding out your hand.

  • • •

  The swimming pool was in the courtyard, beyond the rusted iron gates of the small red apartment building my father had found when Mel asked us to leave his place. One of the gates had hung lower than the other after my mother backed into it that summer, trying to park our family’s new used Cadillac.

  The night this happened, we had dragged our mattresses out of the bedroom and were lying on the living room floor, with the front door open to help break the summer heat. Other families in our building had done the same. I could hear voices all around. After a while, Ba fell asleep, but Ma and I lay awake, restless. She rolled out of bed and walked into the kitchen. I thought she was going to pour herself a glass of water. Instead, she took Ba’s keys, which were hanging from a nail on the wall, and fishing her pocketbook out from under the mattress signaled for me to come with her.

  Ma didn’t know how to drive. We got into the car, and she threw her pocketbook on the dashboard. She put both hands on the steering wheel and rocked it back and forth.

  “Let’s see if this works,” she said, slipping the key into the ignition. When the engine started, she smiled and patted the steering wheel. She practiced a couple of times, backing out and pulling into the parking space, and when she felt confident about those maneuvers, she backed the Cadillac into the middle of the street and turned on the lights. We sat there for a minute, giggling. She said, “This is easy. It’s easier than riding a bicycle. We can’t fall off!” She drove down the very middle of the street, gunning toward stop signs, taking wide left turns, bumping the windshield wipers on by accident so they swayed back and forth, making small squeaking sounds all the way around the block.

  Like everyone else in the building, my father heard the crash. As he came running down the stairs, others came walking out of their apartments. Reassured to know that no one in their family was responsible for the present commotion, people leaned over the second-floor railing or ambled across the courtyard, gathering to see what had happened, and to whom.

  My father fixed my mother with a look, but before he could say anything, she argued that it wasn’t her fault. The car was as big as a boat, she said. Thank God the gates were there, or else the Cadillac would have shot straight into the pool. “And where,” she asked, waving her hand toward the passenger seat, “would that have left the child and me?”

  My father opened the driver’s side door so my mother could step out of the car. I opened the passenger door myself and stepped out. Ma leaned back into the car and grabbed her pocketbook from the dashboard. She didn’t have much money in it—she never would—but she liked carrying it everywhere she went. In one motion, she swung the pocketbook under her left arm, fixed it in place by pressing her left elbow tight against her side and reached for my hand. She calmly walked me up the sixteen steps back into our apartment.

  Ba climbed into the Cadillac, gently backed it away from the mangled gates, turned the car off and remained sitting in the driver’s seat, with the doors closed, the windows up and the lights off, thinking. He then drove the car to the house of a family friend; one of the four uncles Ba and I had come with to America and had lived with for two years, before Ma arrived. The uncle worked as a mechanic at a local garage and he was the one who convinced Ba to get Ma the used Cadillac, a “Welcome to America” present. Ba woke the uncle and, without any kind of explanation, told him that the car was too big. It was too much. He needed something else. The uncle sat up and reached for the pack of cigarettes he kept beside the bed. He thought it was a shame about the Cadillac, but said he understood. Ba gave the uncle the keys to the Cadillac and, a week later, the uncle brought by an orange Mercury Cougar. He said he knew it wasn’t much smaller, but it was the best he could do. He threw the keys to Ba, and Ba hid them from Ma.

  The morning after Ma crashed into the front gates, the landlord came by to check on the busted washing machine in the laundry room. As he approached, he saw the gates wide open, one of them dented and hanging by a hinge. Between them, the pool lay like a bright blue sheet. It rippled slightly but otherwise it was calm. When he reached the gates, he tried to close them. One gate swung forward easily but the broken one had to be picked up and walked into position. He felt uncomfortable doing this. It was like walking a drunk. But he did it anyway.

  As the landlord half carried, half dragged the gate closed—inadvertently shutting himself out of his own courtyard—he silently cursed his tenants. He suspected each and every one of those living in the building’s sixteen units. They were all capable of having done this. They were people who broke things: the washing machine, screen doors, kitchen sinks, windows, the back gate and now the front. And they let their children run wild.

  Out of the corner of his eye, the landlord saw something flutter. It was an empty rice bag, hanging in an open window of the house next door. Years ago, that house, like many on the block, had begun as something pretty, with yellow curtains in the windows and flowering bushes out front. Had they been roses? It was so long ago. Now the house was nothing more than a shell. When a fire gutted the place, the owners never came to fix it or even to tear it down. The landlord noticed that the neighborhood children had taken over the house; tattered bits of cloth, like the empty rice bag, hung in the windows; the front yard, burnt dry by the sun, was littered with branches of eucalyptus and their cones, as if they’d been blown there by a summer storm.

  On the other side of his apartment building was a Church of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was covered in beige stucco and, with its two small watchtowers, looked like a miniature castle on a cake. All it lacked, thought the landlord, were a couple of sentinels, one in each tower to keep guard over the neighborhood.

  A baby cried. A woman’s voice tried to console it, murmuring in a language the landlord didn’t understand. These sounds came from somewhere up on his second floor.

  The landlord looked at the gates to his apartment building. They were crookedly yet firmly in place, one leaning heavily against the other. He struggled with the gates for a moment before managing to push his way through
.

  On his way past the swimming pool, he bent down and picked up some leaves that had gathered in a corner. He cupped the leaves in his hand and felt the water drip between his fingers. Holding his hand away from his body so as not to drip water on himself, the landlord went to see about the washing machine.

  I lived upstairs, in a one-bedroom apartment with my mother and my father. She worked as a seamstress, doing piecework at our kitchen table. He worked as a welder at a factory that made space heaters. Neither of them wanted to be doing it; Ma wanted to have a restaurant, and Ba wanted to have a garden. On weekends, my mother liked to watch kung fu movies at the Chinese movie theater on El Cajon Boulevard and my father liked to drink with his friends.

  The three of us slept in one room. My parents’ double bed was separated from my single bed by a side table with a lamp on it. The base of the lamp was a figurine of an old Chinese man crouching on a rock, his wide pant legs pushed up past his knees. In his hands he held a fishing pole, and his eyes were forever fixed on one spot in the pool of light that was cast back down on the table.

  That was the summer when the older boys in the neighborhood started diving off the second-floor railing into the swimming pool in the courtyard below. From our front windows, we would see one boy after another stand poised on the railing for a minute, bend his knees, push off and disappear as the other boys, each waiting his turn, hooted their approval.

  From where she sat working at the kitchen table, my mother had a clear view of the divers. “Someone is going to die trying to fly like that,” she’d say, carefully feeding small pieces of fabric through her sewing machine. Her words were drowned out by the sewing machine’s noise and the boys’ cries of “Jump! Jump! Jump!” “Hurry up!” “C’mon!”