Disturbed in Their Nests

by Alephonsion Deng

  After being accepted to go to the US, we had weighed the pros and cons of going to a place we knew little about. Was it better than remaining in that desolate refugee camp in Kenya? Many called Kakuma home. It provided safety for tens of thousands.

  Once I decided to go to America, I received three days of orientation. In the beginning when they taught us the basics like using a toilet or stove, I thought those were the most difficult things to learn and that’s why they showed us those things first. I thought I knew what to expect. But I suppose nobody really learns about a country in three days.

  America was not the melting pot of people where nobody did anything and machines did all the work like we’d been told in the camp. We’d believed that human work would be with the mind, not physical labor, which was why Americans were fatter and bigger, a status in my country and in the camp. Fatness meant wealth and prestige.

  Other information we’d been given in the camp was also clearly wrong. Pillows were just soft things to sleep on. No matter how many pillows you owned, you wouldn’t have your life’s support in your hands.

  We liked Judy, but I resented that our sponsor was skinny, not as skinny as us, but she was not fat, just a person of average status and power. She said she didn’t know how we could sign up for school or find a job. Joseph said to be patient and that the IRC would help. I felt unlucky in some ways.

  Then there were the cards. Joseph said I needed a medical card to take care of my stomach pain. That card would come in September. And of course, the green card. So important to have a green card. In the refugee camp we had our ration card for food every sixteen days, and without it we could not get food. Now I needed a green card to support my life.

  A green card was also the pathway to citizenship. I’d been an alien since age ten when I’d crossed into Kenya. When I received my green card, I’d no longer be an alien. I would transform into a man in my new world. Recognized as a citizen of a country. The green card was so important. I had to have it. Period.

  NO-HITTER

  Judy

  The Sunday morning that we returned from Idaho, Shannan, a close friend, called. “Wanna go to the game?”

  “Love to.” Shannan often invited me to join her at Padres baseball games. Cliff and Paul were already going to the same game, but as we only had two season tickets, I usually stayed home. “Just tell me what time to be at your house.”

  “I can’t go. Just wondered if you could use the tickets.”

  Shannan had four season tickets in the club section. Big, wide chairs right behind home plate, plenty of shade, servers who brought food, and bathrooms that never had lines.

  I didn’t hesitate. “Love to have the tickets,” I told her. “I know three people who’ve never been to a baseball game, or a stadium for that matter.”

  I called Benson, Alepho, and Lino’s house to see if they’d like to go. They did. When I arrived, Benson, Lino, and Alepho came out from the bedroom where the ironing board was set up. With their freshly pressed T-­shirts and brand-­new hats they’d be the best-­dressed fans in the stadium.

  “I like your baseball caps,” I said.

  They smiled.

  We said goodbye to their friends. I wished I had ten tickets and a van.

  Benson got in the front, as usual. He was the oldest. He handed me some folded papers. “These are for you,” he said. “We want to work on our English.”

  I partially unfolded one but decided against it. I wanted to read them when I had adequate time. “Thank you, I’m eager to read them.” I put them in my purse.

  We headed north. I’d only gone a few blocks when a man stepped out into the middle of the street pushing two can-­filled grocery carts. I slammed on the brakes. Even on this hottest of summer days he wore layer upon layer of clothes that had soiled into one brownish color. A dappled mutt trailed behind him.

  “Why does he have a dog?” Lino asked.

  “Probably for company and to keep him warm at night.”

  Benson cocked his head. “Why these people sleep outside?”

  “They don’t have a home.”

  “How does this happen in America?” Alepho asked.

  He asked the tough questions. That particular man looked old enough to be a Vietnam vet, but I wasn’t going to bring up post-­traumatic stress disorder or being emotionally damaged by war.

  Before I had an answer, Alepho said, “I gave a man two dollars. He said, ‘Thank you, thank you’ many, many, times.”

  A creepy feeling came over me that this could be the fate of some of the Lost Boys. “That was nice of you,” I told him, swooping down the freeway into Mission Valley. When they saw the stadium loom into view, they chattered in Dinka. I’d been rescued from the subject of the homeless in America.

  Inside the stadium we headed for the food concession stand. Benson and Lino only wanted sodas. I couldn’t seem to get Benson to try American food. I wondered what he ate at home; hopefully his diet wasn’t all Coca-­Cola. Alepho was up for that traditional hot dog I’d told them about. Food in hand, we started through the crowd.

  We’d never been in such a crowded place. Benson, Lino, and Alepho were the tallest and darkest people anywhere in sight. I barely reached their shoulders, and they trailed behind me. People stared. I slowed down to walk beside them several times, but they slowed too, and we ended up in the same awkward formation.

  I stepped onto the steep escalator that rose to our section. Halfway up I sensed that no one was following and looked back. Benson stood at the bottom, eyes riveted on the rising stairs. Of course, they’d never ridden an escalator. “Just step on,” I yelled down. Benson poised his foot over the marching steps and finally chose one. Leaping aboard, he grabbed the rail to steady himself. Lino and Alepho watched and then followed in the same manner, juggling sodas and laughing, while trying to stay upright for the ride.

  Suffering even more stares, we circled around through the inner hallway until we reached our section. At the doorway a view of the entire field and stadium opened like that first glimpse from the rim of the Grand Canyon. The stadium was full—more like a football crowd than a baseball one. This was a big game because the Padres were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks and their towering star, Randy Johnson, was pitching.

  “Wow,” Lino said, his mouth gaping.

  I pointed to the only empty seats in our section and shouted over the noise of the crowd. “We sit just down there. Those empty seats.”

  As I descended the stairs, I noticed the contrast between the diverse crowd we’d just left in the rest of the stadium and the sea of light hair and white skin in this club section. Not one black person or even a person of any color. I’d been here many times. Why hadn’t I noticed before today? Did they see it? Did they feel out of place?

  Our four seats were on the aisle. With their usual courtesy, the guys insisted I go in first. Alepho sat to my immediate left, then Benson, and Lino on the aisle. To my right was a season-­ticket holder—a middle-­aged gentleman who was there every time Shannan and I came. He was a real baseball fan who knew every rule and player, eagerly answered our most inane questions about baseball, and loved to chitchat with Shannan, who usually sat beside him.

  Down on the field three men dressed as fat friars—the Padres’ mascot—raced around the field. The crowd roared.

  “Hi,” I said, like we were long-­lost friends. He didn’t respond. Maybe he couldn’t hear me over the noise.

  The race on the field ended—the friar in the hula print had won—and the crowd quieted.

  Being weak on the subtleties of baseball, I hoped that if I had questions from my guests the man beside me could help. I tried again. “Nice day for a big game.” I was also excited to introduce him to people from another continent, hoping he could help me to show them the game he loved so much.

  Again, no acknowledgment, except that he was careful not t
o put his elbow on our shared armrest. When Shannan was sitting there, he was usually leaning in.

  Thankfully, Alepho appeared absorbed in his food, balancing the cardboard box on his lap, ripping open the little condiment envelopes like mysterious treasures.

  “How do you like the hot dog?” I asked.

  “Dog is good.” He spread the tiny green squares of sweet pickle relish on the next bite. What did that taste like for the first time?

  “Are your headaches getting better?”

  “I have headache,” he said.

  One of the things I found most difficult in our stilted communications was their use of verb tenses. Had things occurred in the past and stopped or were they still occurring?

  “You mean now?”

  “Yes.” Alepho rubbed his forehead.

  “The headaches haven’t stopped?”

  He looked a little impatient with me but I wanted to understand.

  “Yes.”

  I had to quit asking negative questions. Yes could mean no. His answer was probably technically correct, if one assumed that the laws of mathematics applied to linguistics.

  More confused than ever, I offered Alepho two Excedrin, and he took them with his Coke. That oughta do it.

  The players came out onto the field and started tossing the ball around to each other.

  “May we see your house?” Alepho asked.

  “Of course, I’d love that. Perhaps next week. You can swim.”

  I’d just made another commitment. Oh well, I needed one day off from writing.

  “Swim at your house?”

  “Yes, I have a pool.”

  “Pool?”

  “Like the one near the library.”

  “Lino and Benson swim. I do not know how.”

  He’d mentioned that before. That horrible scene of swimming the Gilo River came to mind again. How had Alepho made it across unable to swim? So many missing pieces to the puzzle. So many questions that it felt wrong to ask. And uncaring not to ask.

  The crowd rose. “Stand up,” I said. “Take off your hats and put your right hand on your heart. This is our national anthem.”

  A singer on the field did a slow, dramatic rendition of “The Star-­Spangled Banner.” I doubted they’d heard it before. They looked serious and respectful. How moving it must be to hear the national anthem of one’s newly adopted country for the first time.

  We sat back down. I pointed to field level to show them where Paul and Cliff were sitting and then attempted a brief explanation of the game of baseball, hoping that once they saw it in action it would be self-­evident.

  The man next to me, usually so talkative, acted as though we weren’t there. I’d begun to sense that he was perturbed by our presence and decided to test my theory before passing judgment. “Who do you think we’ll put in as pitcher?”

  He hesitated, but instead of answering he swiveled away from me toward his wife and grabbed another handful of peanuts. Sure, I wasn’t making great baseball talk, but normally he’d strike up a friendly conversation. He may have thought the “I didn’t hear you” technique was benign, but it lit a fire in my belly. I’d never experienced anything quite so rude for having done nothing in the first place.

  The game started. Our pitcher was good. No hits. Every Diamondback struck out.

  I leaned across Alepho so Benson and Lino could hear. “Randy Johnson pitches next for the other team. He’s nearly seven feet tall.”

  “Like Dinka man,” Benson said. “Dinka are the tallest tribe in Africa. My mother was seven feet. Taller than our father.”

  Interesting. These three were tall, but nowhere near seven feet. Closer to six.

  Randy Johnson came to the mound and flung balls toward our hitters at over a hundred miles an hour.

  Alepho said, “We’re short. Not enough food in the camp for growing boys. The little children born in the camp have rickets. Their legs do not grow straight and their teeth do not come in.”

  I wondered if his lapful of food had provoked him to share that information.

  The crowd roared every time Randy Johnson pitched. One strike, two strikes, then three, and the first batter was out. Second batter out, third batter out, and the Diamondbacks came up again.

  I leaned over frequently, trying to explain what was happening in the game, which wasn’t much. It would have been easier to sit in the middle of them but by then I had reservations about changing seats with Alepho and sticking him beside the unfriendly man.

  More innings went by. At the seventh-inning stretch, Cliff and Paul, who were sitting in our regular seats, came by to say hello. Paul met the guys for the first time.

  By the eighth inning, it was clearly a no-­hit pitchers’ duel. Exciting stuff for a packed stadium of seasoned baseball fans. However, me explaining various scenarios of what would happen if the ball ever was hit had surely cured Benson, Lino, and Alepho of wanting to watch baseball forever.

  The game dragged into extra innings. I turned to the man beside me again and nearly shouted, “Think they’ll keep Johnson in the whole game?” No response. Were there really people like this in the year 2001 in Southern California? I felt like the invisible woman, yet I knew it wasn’t me he was ignoring.

  DILING

  Alepho

  I was excited to go to the stadium that we had seen from the freeway. The parking lot was bigger than the one at the store with so many cars, like when all the Dinka from the whole Bahr al-­Ghazal region brought their cows together at the camp. There were cows as far as you could see.

  We walked through so many people and waited in line for food. Judy said that hot dogs were traditional stadium food, so I told her I would try one. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Benson and Lino knew the saying too, but they did not want the hot dog, just sodas.

  The stairs up to the stadium rose out of the ground and moved up. Judy stepped on and rode. She called to us to come. Benson followed first. Once I got my balance, the ride up was nice. We walked through a dark tunnel with people going all directions. I noticed some people staring at us, but we didn’t look different. There were white people, brown people, black people, people of all colors.

  Judy stopped at a big door and we could see into the center of the stadium. It was even more enormous than it had looked from the freeway. Thousands and thousands of people in a circle that soared up into the sky, higher than any tree. Below, a green field covered the bottom.

  We walked down some steps and Judy told us where to sit. I opened my hot dog and the sauces. The hot dog tasted good but the green sauce with little cubes tasted too sweet.

  The game began, but I could not understand what was going on. Was this entertainment in America? Where were the soccer players? Everyone was shouting, and I had no idea why they were shouting. A person ran. They shouted. I asked Benson in Dinka, “That person just ran over there, is that why everyone is shouting?”

  Benson said, “Remember that game the adults called diling? They hit that round small object with a long thin stick to try and make it hit the target. Except in this American diling you hit the ball and then you have to run.”

  I didn’t know the rules of diling but I had seen the adults play it.

  When it became hot, I wanted to leave. These people were eating and drinking and having a good time. I wanted to have a good time. Why couldn’t I have a good time like them? I felt out of place, but I held myself. I didn’t want to say that I wanted to go home because I would ruin the whole thing for everyone. Benson seemed to understand what was going on. He was light about it and having a good time. Lino looked confused like me.

  The stadium was big. Too big. I was uncomfortable. Judy kept explaining things. I nodded my head, because that’s what people do in America to show they understand. But really, I did not understand. They never hit the ball with that stick except one time when a guy h
it the ball and it went so high it landed in the crowd. A small boy caught it. It seemed so easy to hit the ball with that wood stick. Why did they keep missing the ball? If they threw it to me, I would hit it.

  I’d learned in my journeys that there was a certain code for how everything worked in each country and culture. When you didn’t know the code, everything fell apart. I’d learned a lot already about American culture that I could teach the people back in the camp. Still, there was so much more I didn’t yet know.

  BASEBALL BIGOT

  Judy

  I hoped my guests hadn’t noticed that the man next to me wouldn’t acknowledge us. Like everyone else, I’d been slighted or ignored in social situations before, but this barricade of prejudgment was something that I’d never encountered and couldn’t charm away. I wanted to call him out on his rude behavior, but these were Shannan’s season tickets. I had to be respectful of that. Better to forget him. He was the one who was missing out on meeting some extraordinary young men.

  Alepho, Benson, and Lino looked tired, weren’t interested in more food, and even though too gracious and polite to show it, I knew they must be bored. I’d had enough of the chilly aura coming off my stone-­faced seatmate. “I think we should go pretty soon to beat the traffic. Do you want anything before we leave? It’s almost dinnertime and we could pick up some hot dogs on the way out. You won’t have to cook tonight.”

  “Don’t eat dog,” Lino said.

  Oh my God. Did Alepho eat his hot dog just to please me?

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I should have explained. They’re not made from dog. That’s just what they call them. They’re made from beef or pork.” Maybe they didn’t eat pork either. “There are hamburgers and tacos too. Those are beef.”

  “Then why that man have a dog?”

  The homeless man. No wonder they kept asking me why Americans had so many pets. Oh no, he’d suspected it was for the same reason the Dinka had cattle.