First, an American looks Laotian as much as an American looks Irish or Rwandan or wears a turban or won’t eat Kansan hog for religious reasons or is quadriplegic. An American looks like Bout Sinhpraseut. Donna. A small woman with small hands and a mouth full of magnificently white teeth. Smiles like anything can be done, like a lighthouse of faith. Blinds you with it. And an American walks like Donna, in small, determined steps, with legs like pistons, driving her arms through the air, until she has covered a great distance by taking small steps. Walks this way when crossing the parking lot at the Thunderbird to clean rooms or heading up the highway past the Astro, under the suspicious eyes of Jack and Bev, to her other motel, the Holiday Motel, the cow-filled pots rumbling by at full tilt, spraying manure on the pavement at her feet. There in body but always somewhere else, too. Up here in the graveyard, with her God.
See, Bout Sinhpraseut came to this country and became Donna. And her children became Jamie and Johnny, Amanda and Sue. Do you know what it’s like to give up your name and take another? Here’s what it’s like: One day, you’re called Tommy and you live in, say, Wichita or Minneapolis or Atlanta, and the next day you’re in Vientiane, Laos, and the people around you are speaking in a duck-quack rat-a-tat, calling you Inthaithiath. How do you even pronounce that? Only Donna’s husband refused a new name, kept his old one—Boun. You can say it: boon. Once a French teacher in his home country, he finally gave up trying to learn English. After a while, just sat in his bedroom at night, watching Thai movies and reading Laotian books. My husband frightened, says Donna. He wake in morning and come out and say to me, How did we get here?
According to Donna, this is how: Leave your home in Laos, village called Champassak near Cambodian border, and go to Texas. You don’t know anything, can’t figure out the first thing about this circus, America—so you learn everything from scratch. When you open your mouth, folks in big, silly hats look sideways at you, hear only that duck-quack rat-a-tat. Everyone who’s not a cowboy is either Chinese or Vietcong. They don’t look kindly on you, either, tell you to go back where you came from. You live in a little apartment. You’re packed in pretty tight, all six of you. Everything is a circus. Your little kids are afraid of black people in the streets, come home from school shaking, don’t wanna go back. Scare you, too. Ask neighbor, Are they human or animals? Neither, he says. Just niggers.
Nigger—what does that mean?
You may be a short person, but you still have a big heart. And seen trouble before. Seen your brother poisoned and killed by Buddhists back in Laos and had two friends blown up by land mines. Ran through jungle with Communists firing at your back. You get your family out of Houston to Dodge City, and you go to slaughterhouse and work ten years. Hard work but good money. Husband work, too. Once he was a French teacher; now he scoops slime out of cows. Sometimes you’re so sick of seeing the insides of cows, you don’t think you can ever see another one—but still you come back. Some days, you’re so tired you can’t stand, but you still rise the next morning. Back to the slaughterhouse. Back to whirring saw blades and sickening smell. The smell of melting cow bones. You can’t really eat for ten years with that smell on you all the time. Just go on bleary-eyed, like some kind of prizefighter, just keep taking those steps, working the arms. And you start saving, too. Buy gold jewelry. Round $26,000 worth. That pretty good.
But now, here’s where it gets tricky. You live in a trailer park surrounded by other recent immigrants—Vietnamese, Laotians, Chinese—and most of these people, they don’t have bank accounts or insurance or anything like that. They work in the slaughterhouse and keep their money in twenty-four-carat-gold jewelry—hide it, like you, in the house. You’re smarter, though, also have a bank account and some money stashed there. But then come home one day from work and the front door’s open. Kids—Jamie and Johnny, Amanda and Sue—are tied up in the living room, and some men tie you up, too. They wave their guns and tell everyone to shut up and they take everything, all the gold, and then turn off the lights. They’re gang members—Asian Pride or something, Vietnamese or Laotian, and even though you’re one of them, they hate you because you work hard, because you’re moving up. They take most of your ten years at the slaughterhouse, walk it right out the door for you. Take your American citizenship papers, too. Do you know what it feels like to be left sitting in the dark, tied to your own chair, watching your life walk out the door? Have you ever seen your own kids tied up and crying?
And in this time, Donna becomes a different woman; something begins to build in her, too. Can you feel it? She begins to hate, because now she really knows she is hated. And somehow, it makes her that much more determined. Get up and go to work again and again and again. Nearly starts from scratch and prays for God to reveal himself to her. And one day, he does. He just comes to her. Seems like he seven feet tall, says Donna. Weigh three hundred pounds. Name is Dwayne. Dwayne Price. Big white man, drives a Continental. Donna’s giant, her God. Owns the Countryside Manor trailer park, where many of the Asians in Dodge City live, where Donna’s family lives. Knows Donna’s family, hears about its trouble. He’s a big white man with a big car, in his early sixties, and he takes pity on Donna and tells her he’s going to help her. He grosses about $15,000 a month from the trailer park, owns a six-bedroom house, got five bathrooms in it, and a wife who’s twenty years younger and three daughters—all of whom he claims don’t love him. Buy them all new cars and they still don’t love him. So, on sunbaked days, with the stench of manure pressing down on the grain elevators and wood-framed houses of Dodge City, he cruises with Donna in his big Continental, a perpetual cigarette in his mouth, pricing out property. She has some money of her own for a down payment; he shows her how it all works. She buys the Thunderbird and then, with the first six months of income from that, buys the Holiday. Both of them are dumps, but they haven’t met Donna yet. She knows how to clean.
Boun, Donna’s husband, he’s afraid of Dwayne’s brilliance and his doctrines about money—how money invested becomes money earned, how risk turns to profit. But Donna, she has faith. She runs the Thunderbird; daughter Amanda runs the Holiday. Boun, he cuts the grass, moves heavy things. They are nervous and happy, and still they are hated. Sometimes, white folk drive in, then drive out when they see Donna at the desk: Some are vets, some maybe lost kids in Vietnam, some are militia members, some just feel like giving her the finger. There’s a bullet hole in the lobby window here, too. When the hotels are full in the center of Dodge City, the desk clerks don’t recommend Donna’s motels. Dirty, they say. Try the American-owned place. Translation: Avoid the gooks.
Gook—what does it mean, anyway?
What eventually happens here is that Dwayne is stricken with cancer, and because he’s more or less estranged from his own family and because he and Donna are now inseparable, Donna has him move into the Thunderbird with her family. Right into their living quarters, with its new shag rug and new TV and Walmart art on the wall. But he doesn’t just move in, he moves right into her bed. Everybody think I was girlfriend, but wasn’t like that, Donna says now. I do anything to support family, but I don’t sell body.
Dwayne Price sheds weight, goes downhill fast, has a terrible hacking cough. In Donna’s mind, seven feet, 300 pounds. But wasting away—250, 210, 170, 145, 120 pounds. She massages his great white back, sponges his wide white shoulders, feeds him when he loses strength. She curls onto the vast white suburb of his body and sleeps there, in his white light, in a cool white lane of sheets, so if he dies in his sleep, he dies with her arms around him, roped over his body knowing he was loved. Let his whole race mistreat her during the day; at night, she is here with Dwayne, whispering, dreaming up plans for the two of them to one day visit Laos. And what does Dwayne get from this? He gets to be a god. He gets love. He gets a dignified, deified death. And Donna? She draws power from him, or he gives it to her. And Boun himself knows this man is like no other man, knows this man has a special, otherworldly gift. He has taken them from the hell of the sl
aughterhouse, saved them from the cows, and delivered them to the Thunderbird—and Boun is, for once, less anxious. Yes, Dwayne is dying, but they are blessed. Boun stays in his own bedroom now, down the hall from Donna and Dwayne, watching Thai movies, colors pulsating over his body in the dark. He puts a picture of Dwayne up on his Buddhist altar, where he lights incense each night.
And then Dwayne passes.
So follow Donna now, under the cottonwoods, to the grave of Dwayne Price. Listen to her talk to her God. About how the Mexican whore is two-timing her husband in 225. About how the ice-cream-truck driver in 220 took all the towels when he left. About the bikers who broke the framed print entitled Afternoon Punting, of English ladies observing swans in an English park somewhere. Every little thing. Do you know what it’s like to believe so deeply in something, in a race of people that most often hates you, in a country that is your country now and yet pulls up in your parking lot and flips you the bird? Maybe the difference between you and Donna is that she hates and understands that she is hated back. But more than that: She believes, too. She takes you to the graveyard, on a hill looking down on Dodge City, above the cows and the slaughterhouses and all the white people. This place where she goes every day to leave an offering of oranges or flowers at the foot of this marble headstone that she rubs again and again, like it’s Dwayne Price’s white back.
Midnight along Wyatt Earp Boulevard—comets of passing traffic, an occasional drunk stumbling along the shoulder. Stand in a place before Red’s Cafe, near Iseman Mobile Homes, out on the edge, right before Dodge City turns back to a country of red dirt and wheat fields and feed yards again. Look across the street. See that stubby, thickly built man with muscular legs, wearing a weight belt and baseball cap, the one pedaling a mountain bike? Boun on a covert mission, on his way from the Thunderbird to the Holiday to check on daughter Amanda. But not just that: At the edge of the Astro parking lot, he teeters off into the dark shadow of a concrete wall. Sits a while on his bike, hand propped against the wall, feet on the pedals, counting. Can see Jack Hooker in the glassed-in lobby, but Jack Hooker can’t see him. Jack Hooker is standing behind the desk, head down, reading something—a National Geographic. At this hour, in this light, Jack Hooker looks older than he is and younger, too. Boun never sleeps a night without knowing exactly how many cars are in the parking lot at the Astro Motel and reporting it back to Donna. The best way to beat your competition, said Dwayne Price, is to know your competition. Tonight’s cars: Thunderbird, twenty; Astro, four. What more do you need to know?
Behind the desk back at the Thunderbird, fifty yards from where Jack Hooker stands reading his National Geographic, Donna is sitting behind her own reception desk watching Married … with Children reruns on TV. I like Al Bundy, she says. Like a lot. Funny funny things come out of his mouth. The laugh track laughs incessantly. Donna laughs, taking her cue from the laugh track. Those teeth—blinding. Now wait here a while and laugh with Donna. Wait until a man eventually comes in—got a swabby head of white hair and bloodshot eyes—and says he was a friend of Dwayne Price’s and Donna’s eyes light up. Can remember this man, a peanut salesman? Something like that, right? Vending machine, he says. Chuckles, Snickers, Kit Kats. It’s after midnight, but at the Thunderbird the night is its own day, has its own constant neon bloom of light—people come at all hours, for all reasons—and Donna doesn’t sleep that much anyway, not since Dwayne died. Miss him, says Dwayne’s friend. He had a good heart.
Donna nods, pulls out a photo album. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures of Dwayne, in various stages of wasting away, a man in the stunned process of some final realization. I’m going to die. Even now, Donna keeps pairs of his oversized underwear piled in her bedroom drawers. Keeps his baseball cap and socks. Leaves offerings to him on Boun’s altar. She is wearing one of his blue short-sleeved shirts now, comes down to her knees. Every night in the last year of his life, they slept together but didn’t sleep together: Two people with apparently nothing in common went down into some river running beneath all of this stumbling, cursed, warring humanity and became one thing—not yellow or white or black or orange but just one pure thing. Donna didn’t try to possess Dwayne Price’s death—that was his alone. And Dwayne—he couldn’t possess the other Donna, the one named Bout Sinhpraseut, the woman who led her family through the jungles of Laos with Communists shooting at her back. And neither of them tried. They just were. Donna helped Dwayne Price die, and Dwayne Price just showed her how to be an American.
So this is your life, Donna’s life: sheets and towels and dirty toilets. Money, always money. Worry about kids. One daughter been hurt by her Vietnamese husband. When it comes to him, won’t even acknowledge that word: husband. Errands. Every three weeks, fifty new towels from Walmart. Sheets and dirty toilets. Fuss over kids. Count money. Have Boun replace air conditioner in 218. Bring food to another dying man in 223, the one who stands behind his curtains, glassy-eyed, staring out all day, every day. Gonna die in that room. Worry about kids. Other daughter, the one off to university this fall, going to marry a Mexican who stayed at Thunderbird. Why the Mexican? Then give thanks in the graveyard, near the cottonwoods. Thanks to Dwayne Price. Remember where you were before him, where you’re going after him.
Sometime, we get poor people here, says Donna. It rain, it snow. We give free room, some food. We get help when we were down. If people ring bell at 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., I get up and smile. I tell them prices. They come and say they were next door and Jack said, Don’t ring our bell if you aren’t going to stay. He grouchy. That not way to do business. She shakes her head, dissatisfied. Astro used to get good business, not so good now. We on the way up, she says. They going down.
Listen to her. Listen to Bev Hooker tell what happened and hear what she’s really saying, beneath the words.
Seems there’s been a disturbance in the night at the Astro Motel, and Bev is still flustered. See, she usually goes to bed around 10:00 P.M., then wakes before 6:00 A.M. to handle the early shift. Jack, he gets up when he wants but then handles the late-night. Still, he’ll turn in around 1:00 A.M., and then if he hears the doorbell ring, or if Nikki, their sweet Australian shepherd with half-rotten teeth, starts barking, he’ll get up and go out to see who’s there. Problem is, Jack’s become hard of hearing, confides Bev in a whisper. And the dog’s deaf, too. So it’s Bev Hooker who often answers the door, huddled in her bathrobe, out of the daze and blindness of sleep, her swirled perm of sandy curls a bit lopsided, opening the door to whoever comes off the highway, opening it to whatever they want from her. And they always want something.
Well, last night, late, the bell rings, and Bev stumbles from bed, puts on her robe, goes to the door, and sees some Asiatic guy jes grinnin’ away. They look at each other for a moment from either side of the glass, and she could tell he was a kook. She thinks about calling 911, reaches back and puts her hand on the phone. The Asiatic on the other side, jes grinnin’ away. Wearing some kind of pea-green jacket. And something makes her open the door. Reach up and draw back the dead bolt. Don’t know why. Not usually such a risk taker, but it isn’t natural for someone to be at the door jes grinnin’ like a kook, especially an Asiatic. Puts his foot inside, says he is selling wind chimes. Wind chimes? You come back in the day, then we’ll talk. Said it sharply then a couple more times before he got her drift. She bolted the door again and went back and lay awake in bed. She looks kind of shell-shocked remembering it now, the morning after, and scared, too, as if it’s a hopeless thing ever to try to understand the deep strangeness of the Asiatics. Makes you shudder to think what he really had in mind.
So, standing in the air-conditioned lobby of the Astro Motel with Bev Hooker this sweltering morning, have you really heard her story? What she’s telling you is that it’s a war out here, on the edge. She’s telling you that someone is schlepping around Dodge City at 3:00 A.M., selling wind chimes or pretending to sell wind chimes with the idea of making money—one way or the other. Money—that’s what everything ge
ts reduced to. That’s what everyone’s fighting for out here. And when it comes to money, Bev says, no one can be trusted. Not even her own kind. We had white girls in here helping us clean once, she says. Big, fat white girls. They don’t work. They’ll try to cheat you. That’s why we have Mexicans now.
Harder still for Bev to look at Donna and her people, so many of them over there—and not think of their greed, too, how they out-American the Americans almost, but playing the whole thing kind of dirty, by different rules: doing all the work themselves to cut costs, taking food right out of the mouths of white folk. What kind of neighbor is that? Started when they put those signs out. Before that, why, Bev Hooker talked to Donna. Donna would come over at first, sometimes bring cookies. Realized the Astro charged $28 for a single. Then, according to Jack and Bev Hooker, put that sign out. SINGLE, $26.95. See two signs now: one at the Holiday and one at the Thunderbird. False advertising, declares Bev. Draw people off the road, then say the cheap rooms are already full. Before that, yes, they spoke, though Bev confesses she didn’t know Donna’s last name, has so many vowels you don’t know what it is. (You can say it: sin-pra-sit.) Now they don’t speak at all. After Donna put her signs up, Jack Hooker went right out and put up his own sign: AMERICAN OWNED. Donna retaliated by buying a bunch of American flags, put them up everywhere. But I think we’re having the last laugh, says Bev confidently. The wind out here just rips ’em right up, and she’s wasting a lot of money.
Love and Other Ways of Dying Page 7