by Andrew Lanh
EMTs pushed me and the others aside as the nurse whispered to them.
I walked over to Hank who was watching me closely.
“Tell me it’s okay,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“One day something has to go right for that boy, no?”
I didn’t answer, afraid my voice was too foggy. I felt like crying.
Some stragglers approached us, but Hank waved them away, puffing up his state trooper chest. A wail of sirens as police cars turned into the lot. Hank nudged the body lying between two cars, the shooter’s gun kicked away from his extended hand. I noticed a wedding band. A man bundled up in layers of winter clothes. A head buried under a ski cap pulled low on his forehead.
“He dead?”
Hank nodded.
“The car with the white primer door.”
After Hank’s shot zeroed into his chest, the shooter fell on his side, his face buried in the snow. I watched Hank slowly maneuver the body, righting the head.
“You know this loser?” he asked me.
“Yeah. Timmy Trang.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Late afternoon on Christmas day at John Dempsey Hospital. The cafeteria was mostly deserted. Liz, Hank, and I huddled by a window, staring out at the banks of snow from last night’s blizzard. The state had been closed down until mid-morning, crippling Christmas services at churches and families headed out for holiday cheer—and crippling the investigation of the shooting in the Gospel of Wealth Ministry parking lot. The lone cashier said she was surprised anyone showed up. Late afternoon, the winter sky darkening and the snow turning to ice. “Just the three of you. Go figure.”
Hank teased Liz because of the huge box of chocolates she’d placed on the table.
“I thought I’d die when I got that phone call,” she was saying. “Imagine. The two of you racing around that parking lot like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday.”
Hank grinned. “More like Road Runner and Scooby-Doo.”
I sat back. “He made it. That’s what matters.”
Dustin lay in a bed upstairs, room 315, heavily bandaged and medicated—but alive. Bloodied, drifting in and out of consciousness, but alive. Superficial wounds to his face and neck, the bullets that shattered the windshield had found their mark. Another shot struck him in the chest, dangerously danced around his heart, ricocheted against his rib cage, caused internal bleeding, and effectively knocked him out. He was fading as the EMTs took over, but Dustin wasn’t ready to die.
“His own brother,” Liz said now.
“I would have thought the ex-con. Hollis. Hiep. But it was Timmy who overheard a conversation that Uncle Binh had with Dustin’s mother—and learned about the dead soldier and the reward.”
Liz stressed, “Yes, according to Uncle Binh, as relayed to me earlier by Detective Manus. He was at Binh’s house until late last night.”
Hank was nodding. “Yeah, that’s one story the old man is telling. But the cops figure something else was going on. Uncle Binh, alarmed at the way things were working out with Dustin and Ben Winslow, might have panicked, confided in his nephew. Take care of the Winslow guy—he’s trouble. There was so much money at stake.”
“We’ll never know,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a plan Timmy could hatch on his own. I agree—Uncle Binh from that wheelchair probably felt powerless. Unable to control Dustin and Ben once things started falling apart. He’d need an ally. Someone who had no qualms about…”
“Brutal murder.” From Hank.
“Even his own brother.”
“Once his mother told Binh that he’d stolen the bone fragment, that set off a chain reaction. They didn’t believe Dustin had told anyone”—I caught Hank’s eye as he nodded—“but they couldn’t take a chance. Dustin had become a wild card—he might spill the beans. Get him out of the way.”
Liz shivered. “But to kill your brother.”
“What brother?” I said hotly. “Timmy and Hollis didn’t talk to Dustin. They disliked him.”
“Cain killed Abel, Rick,” Hank said. “It was on the news.”
“But Dustin’s mother?” Liz wondered.
“Look. Dustin was in the way since the day he was born on Route 6.”
“So Hollis was the only one kept in the dark,” Hank said.
I nodded. “Too dangerous. Uncle Binh had to trust Timmy, but only so far. Reluctantly, probably. Timmy is a little nuts. When Dustin told his mother that Ben wouldn’t play games with them, that Ben gave Dustin a window to comply and talked of the FBI, something had to be done. Time to let Timmy trail him, shoot him to death.”
“And he shot Darijo,” Liz added.
“Crazy, Timmy was running off in all directions. Suddenly he’d been told of millions of dollars available. A goldmine. The key. Probably he heard echoes of Reverend Simms’ promises of paradise from his mother. From TV he learned that the cops questioned Darijo. What had Dustin told him?”
“And he was following you,” Hank added.
“Yes, and our path led to Little Bosnia. Ka-clunk ka-clunk.”
“The car with the one white primer panel.” Hank laughed out loud.
“Don’t take any chances. Kill Darijo. Just in case. But Timmy was no marksman. Yes, Ben at close range. But not from a car window.”
“Which,” Liz went on, “was a lucky thing for Darijo. Otherwise he might be dead.”
“Ka-clunk ka-clunk.” Hank mimicked my dreadful onomatopoeia.
“It turns out,” Liz informed us, “Timmy worked part-time in a used car lot down on King Street. He borrowed that old wreck. Otherwise Dustin might have recognized Timmy’s own rattletrap Honda.”
“One question I have.” I looked at Liz. “Dustin talked about Timmy stopping over with his wife and son—and his mother cooling her heels, waiting to explode after they left.”
“Simple,” Liz noted. “Uncle Binh, crafty old fool, told the cops he never told Dustin’s mom that Timmy had found out about their scheme.”
“So he says,” Hank added.
“That could be a lie,” Liz said.
I added, “Also, think of it, Timmy was with his wife and kid. Maybe that’s a reason for her silence.”
“The bottom line,” Hank summed up, “is that Binh and Suong and Dustin’s mom Mai reluctantly trusted Dustin to follow through on something. They didn’t like him. They wished he weren’t around. They probably wished they didn’t need him. But they did—and it backfired. More guilt for Dustin—obey your mother. They felt he betrayed them by telling Ben, who turned on Dustin. Ben was a threat.”
“And Dustin was a threat. A powder keg, especially after the bone fragment went missing.” I shook my head back and forth. “Dustin didn’t believe Ben’s murder had anything to do with him—or his family. That’s why he kept protesting his innocence—and his surprise that anyone would point a finger at him. Because it was only the three old folks—and him. He never considered Timmy.”
“What now?” Liz had a faraway look in her eyes.
I sipped the last of my coffee. “I’ve put a call into the FBI. The gears are grinding. More questions for Uncle Binh about the remains in Vietnam, real or fake. There’s protocol involved—complicated, I understand. No matter— there’ll be a punctuation mark placed at the end of that long periodic sentence.”
“Paragraph,” Hank insisted. “Long paragraph.”
“And Dustin?” From Liz, concern in her voice.
“God knows. Home to that toxic environment. Hated before. Hated even more now. Can you put hatred on a graduated scale? Whatever it is, he’s a boy without a country. He took away the golden egg.”
“The golden key,” Hank stressed. “Blessed are the sleek…”
“Let’s go,” Liz stood up, tucked the box of chocolate to her chest.
My fingers touched the red ribbo
n on the box. “Did I ever tell you about my first taste of chocolate?”
Both Liz and Hank glanced at each other. “Every Easter when you bite into the chocolate bunny we give you.” Liz gave me a peck on the cheek.
Hank punched me in the shoulder as he walked by. “Happy Easter, Buddha.”
Upstairs Dustin watched us through groggy, half-closed eyes. So tiny, this dark skinny boy lost in clouds of white. A white bandage on his neck and jaw. Bandages across his chest.
“You.” One word that took all of us in.
Liz leaned in and gave him a kiss, though he winced. The bruises he’d gotten earlier from Hollis were fading now. No eyeglasses, I realized, probably lost during his manic flight across that parking lot.
“I hope you like chocolate,” Liz told him. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “You’ll have to keep them hidden from Rick.”
Dustin squeaked out two words. “Hey, Liz.” A sloppy grin.
“Rick and Hank are here, too.”
Dustin was smiling. “Hey, Liz.”
I grinned at Hank. “I guess he’s on the mend.”
But Dustin was fading, his eyes closing. I squeezed his hand and whispered in his ear, “Everything is going to be all right, Dustin. We’ll take care of you.”
His head jerked to the side. But then a slight wheeze escaped his throat. He was sound asleep.
***
Hank and I pulled into the driveway of the rooming house on Federal Hill. I parked my car alongside a rotting wooden shed, the back wheel of my car sinking into a pothole. The January thaw the past few days had turned frozen ice and filthy snow into rivers of sluggish run-offs. Muddy fields, slippery sidewalks, tree boughs sagging under melting snow. I backed the car up, sloshing through a puddle that probably dropped two feet. I groaned. Bits of broken asphalt and sand sprayed up into my windshield.
“I hate this place,” Hank mumbled.
We stared at the ramshackle Victorian house, sliced into smallish one-room homes for local transients. Cracked windowpanes, lopsided shutters, roof tiles slipping into the gutters, porches missing railings, a plywood sheet nailed on a door panel. The house had given up after the brutal winter.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
Two weeks before, just after New Year’s, Hank and I had visited Dustin in his single room on the third floor. Released from the hospital, he’d returned home to find the climate in his mother’s rooms arctic. Uncle Binh had repeatedly been questioned by the Bristol cops, the state police, even the FBI stepping in after my call about the mystery hidden in that Vietnamese village—and he resented the implication that he’d orchestrated Timmy’s murder plot. He protested a little too hotly, and finally he chose silence. Dustin’s mother, stunned by the death of her son and refusing to believe that he had tried to kill his own brother to silence him, wailed that Dustin had single-handedly stolen their chance for happiness. The key to riches. So when Dustin was settled in his own bed at home—I had delivered him from the hospital to the projects—she hammered away at him, furious, bewildered, unforgiving.
At night she woke him by pounding on his locked bedroom door. One time, talking with him a day or so later, mid-afternoon, I heard the pounding begin. A high, piercing voice hissed through the door—“You took away our happiness.”
Dustin hung up the phone. He didn’t say goodbye.
A day later she told him he had to move, and the next call I received was from the grungy rooming house a half-mile away. His cellphone sputtered, staticky, lost connection, but later he called back from the street. “My new address. But I don’t want you to come here.”
Of course, we did, Hank and I. Dustin’s Spartan room held a single bed with a lumpy, dark-stained mattress, a nightstand missing a leg, and a maple chest of drawers painted a hideous deck green. Dustin sat on the edge of his bed, still bandaged but healthier, color in his cheeks, and told us we couldn’t stay. “I don’t want people to see this.”
Hank pointed at the pale green shag carpeting probably installed when Richard Nixon waved goodbye on the final helicopter. Forty dollars a week, no meals. The crunch of flaky cockroach bodies crunching underfoot in the carpeting. Marijuana seeds in the crevices of the warped bed railings. Folks wandering the hallways all hours of the night, wailing, sobbing, blaming the world.
“Christ.” Hank was steamed.
Two weeks later Hank and I climbed those dark rickety stairs again and knocked on Dustin’s door.
“You ready?” I asked Dustin.
He nodded. He reached for his winter coat, carefully buttoned it, slipped on his knit cap, and reached for a case that held his laptop. An army canvas bag with camouflage coloring was next to him. A plastic Shop-Rite bag held some pairs of shoes. A old leather briefcase with buckles and straps—I was reminded of the old Russian émigrés I’d seen wandering Washington Heights in Manhattan a thousand years ago—held papers and books.
“That everything?”
He nodded. “Everything I want.”
I caught Hank’s eye. A lifetime collection of stuff that could fit into the trunk of a small car—with room to spare.
“Let’s go,” I said.
He hesitated, his eyes focused on Hank. “You sure?”
Hank said nothing but reached for the duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder. Finally, grinning, “You bet.”
When we arrived at Hank’s family’s home in East Hartford a half-hour later, the front door swung open and Grandma beamed at us. Behind her, Hank’s mother was trying to maneuver around Grandma, who refused to budge. As Dustin neared, Grandma reached out and touched his shoulder. “Welcome to your home.”
His eyes flickering, Dustin stiffened, his head darting back to look for Hank.
Hank was grinning. “Actually my old room. I’d hoped it would get national landmark status, but I guess the Fates had different plans.”
Grandma leaned into Dustin. “You must be hungry.” She nodded at Hank’s mother. “We need to feed him immediately.”
The kitchen table was covered with food. Platters of fresh summer rolls, bowls of fried rice, bowls of fish sauce, a roasted chicken hacked into pieces, barbecued pork strips. Grandma pointed, “For you, Rick. A happy pancake. But save some for Dustin.” And on the counter a massive sheet cake in a Costco box, brilliant red piped lettering that was supposed to say, in Vietnamese, “Welcome, Dustin.” Chao mung, Dustin. But the unfortunate and doubtless harried bakery clerk at the store had switched a letter. What I saw was: Chao dung.
Of course dung is pronounced yum. As in yummy.
But the error ironically translated as: Welcome brave one.
I smiled.
In the two weeks since Hank and I visited Dustin in that Dickensian hovel, all sorts of family machinations happened. Hank’s family—particular Grandma—had followed the story on TV and in the newspapers, demanding translation into Vietnamese of whole paragraphs that baffled her. And Hank’s own recitation of Dustin’s woes, including his exile from his own mother’s home, had alarmed Grandma. For a couple days the women of the household, a solid voting bloc, had discussed Dustin’s fate, only to discover that Grandpa was indifferent to their schemes—and Hank’s father sat back, a Budweiser in hand, and mused that Dustin was a remarkable pool player and perhaps his presence in the house…now that Hank was gone…perhaps his buddies Joe and Loc had a few surprises waiting for them when next Hank’s father cued up the balls at Minh Le’s Bar and Pool Hall in Little Saigon.
Hank’s old room, now Dustin’s.
Grandma was gleeful. “A house must have young people in it. You know what I always say.”
“Yes,” Hank answered in Vietnamese, “Cang dong cang vui.” The more, the merrier.
Hank’s mother added, “I’m assuming he’ll keep it cleaner than you did. Those grimy socks hanging off the lamp.”
“I needed to
air them out,” Hank protested.
“Yes, and the Board of Health nailing notices to our front door.”
Hank, delighted, kissed his mother on the cheek.
So Dustin found a new home, though he was skittish about it. After his name was cleared, the college reinstated him, though Professor Laramie still had qualms and registered his dismay. Steadfast, Marcie and Vinnie trumpeted Dustin’s return, and managed to garner him scholarships—full tuition and books. He could be a full-time student, and the work-study job that the college offered—twenty hours a week in the college library—gave him spending money, gas money, and the nominal boarding costs Hank insisted he pay at Grandma’s. “He doesn’t want charity. Nobody does.”
During all these late-night or Sunday-dinner negotiations, Dustin moved mechanically, hesitantly, and at one point he expressed a fear that he’d fail everyone—that he’d stumble, bungle his classes, disappoint Grandma, betray Hank’s confidence.
Hank shrugged that off. “It’s your turn, Dustin,” he told him one night as the three of us ate hamburgers at Shady Glen in Manchester. “Just remember that.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I answered him. “We know.”
***
On the first spring day in April we sat in Hank’s parents’ living room watching the TV screen. Hank diddled with his laptop, accessing a live podcast from Washington and streaming it onto the TV. We sat in a regimented line, Hank’s parents on the sofa, with Grandpa dozing on the end, his head resting on the arm. Grandma sat in the wing chair, her small body lost in the oversized chair. We’d carried in chairs from the dining room, putting Dustin on her left. Hank stooped in front of the TV. We waited as he adjusted the sound, the feed. “Okay, then,” he announced. “Ready set go.”
We sat in reverential silence as the solemn ceremony took place at Arlington National Cemetery. The camera panned the breathtaking sweep of white marble headstones. Quietly, the announcer narrated the ceremonial internment of Private First Class James “Jimmy” Dodson, the MIA whose remains had been located in the small hamlet a few kilometers outside of Vung Tau.