Snakes Can't Run

by Ed Lin

  While I was washing my face someone came out of the bathroom stall and stood at the sink next to me. When I was done wiping my face I saw that the guy next to me was a gang member. To anybody else he looked like a young college student.

  “Didn’t I take your Polaroid in the park?” I asked him.

  He jumped about two feet in the air.

  “Jesus, what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Never mind why I’m here. Are you in the group that’s meeting in the private banquet room down here?”

  “Yeah, I was invited to the dinner. Do I need a passport to leave Chinatown, or something?”

  “No, you don’t. But I still want to know what you’re doing here.”

  “It’s an off-site meeting for the young people of Chinatown that Andy Ng put together. He wanted to show us the story of Chinese people in the global historical context.”

  “What did he show you?” I was surprised to see genuine interest light up in the kid’s face.

  “He had a slide show of the highlights of the Tang and Ming dynasties. He showed the sea routes that Chinese took almost a decade before Columbus. We went everywhere! All the way to Africa and probably even to the west coast of the United States!”

  “What kind of talk is that?” I asked.

  “They found stone anchors off the coast of San Francisco that were exactly the kind the Chinese used during the Ming.”

  I left the restroom, walked down the hall, and threw open the private banquet room door.

  I had expected to find a room full of Chinese guys, cigarettes dangling from their lips, hunched over cards.

  Instead it looked like I had walked into a classroom. Everyone had a book open and was following along with Ng, who was standing by a chalkboard that featured a time-line comparison between Europe and China. Incredibly, rival gang members were sitting side by side, mixed in with each other.

  Most of these boys had dropped out of school—some even before high school—and despite having attention spans shorter than the time it took to chew a Tootsie Roll, here they were quietly learning. They may have still been animals, but now they were fit for a petting zoo.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought this was the lost and found!”

  “Officer Robert Chow!” said Ng, who stepped off to the side. “You are no stranger to the fellows in this room!” The guy I ran into in the restroom shuffled in past me and took his seat. “I hope I’m not judging you unfairly, but you are a perfect example of a Chinese who may have lost touch with his roots.”

  “I know who I am!” I retorted.

  “You’re all right with me, Robert.” Ng walked over to me and put an arm on my shoulder. “This man is my brother,” he told the boys. “Whenever you see him in the street, give him the proper respect that an elder deserves. Anybody who even speaks badly about Officer Chow will have to answer to me! Okay?”

  The kids nodded. I was caught off-guard. So much so that before I left I shook Ng’s hand and waved good-bye to the class.

  I came back to the table and found Barbara and Lonnie tussling over the check.

  “Robert, are you all right?” asked Barbara. “You were gone quite a while!”

  “I ran into someone I knew.”

  “You look a little shaken,” said Lonnie.

  I took the opportunity to grab the check. “Barbara, I’ve got this,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly!” she said. “My firm does so much business here they’ll probably just waive the check!”

  “We don’t need any more favors from you, Barbara. But you have to get Lonnie this job.”

  “It’s signed, sealed, and delivered,” she said. “I have a lot of ins with Presswire.”

  “Isn’t this great, Lonnie?” I asked.

  She smiled a little too wide. “It is wonderful. Thank you so much for your help, Barbara.”

  When we got to my apartment, Lonnie let me have it.

  “I can’t believe that woman!” she said. “She still obviously has feelings for you, and she’s willing to dress up like a high-class call girl to get you to look at her!”

  I was sitting on the couch, but Lonnie remained standing.

  “She’s an old friend, Lonnie. We grew up together.”

  “You were more than just friends!”

  “We had to see her to get you this job. Otherwise, I would never hang out with her anymore.”

  “While you were gone she had the nerve to say that since she had gotten Paul a job and now me, she should get new jobs for my parents!”

  “I’m sure she was just kidding.”

  “The way she talked about Chinatown made it sound like a backward third-world country!”

  “See, Lonnie, the Chinatown Barbara and I grew up in was so different from the way it is now. All the kids spoke English and we had a malt shop to hang out in. It all changed like a decade ago. All these Hong Kong kids came in and took over and Chinatown became a foreign country to us, you know, because we’re Americans.”

  “Did you ever wish you had a real American girlfriend like Barbara?” Lonnie asked, finally dropping next to me on the couch.

  “You are an American, Lonnie.”

  “I mean born here.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me. Look at us. All the other Americans think we come from Hong Kong, anyway.”

  “But I am from Hong Kong!”

  “And you’re the best thing from Hong Kong, ever!”

  “Robert, how did things change when those kids came over?”

  “Oh, man. They were friendly at first with the American-borns, but then they learned to resent us for not being Chinese enough. Guys like me had to deal with racist jerks in high school and then Hong Kong jerks at home. Back then high school was only about thirty percent Chinese—not like now where we’re the majority.”

  “So the American-borns fought with the Hong Kong Chinese?”

  “There wasn’t any organized fighting and the gangs back then had a mix of the two kinds of Chinese. It was a lot of stupid boy stuff, hitting each other with rolls of steel washers and doorknobs.”

  “How do you hit someone with a doorknob?”

  “You put a bunch of them in a sack and swing it around.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe you became a cop.”

  “I can’t believe I’m still alive.”

  “That’s only because you guys didn’t have guns. You weren’t shooting each other.”

  “Speaking of our troubled youth, Lonnie, whatever happened to those kids who used to hang out with Paul at your bakery?”

  “I’m not sure. You know Paul was their leader. After you put him to work, they didn’t hang out there anymore.”

  “I think I saw some of them tonight.”

  “At the restaurant?”

  “Yeah, I saw a whole bunch of delinquents in a private room eating together. I thought I saw some of Paul’s old friends.”

  “Sometimes when gangs have disputes, they go outside of Chinatown to work things out peacefully.”

  “This was different, though. They were listening to a lecture about Chinese history.”

  “That doesn’t sound right, Robert.”

  “I know.”

  She shucked off her high-heeled shoes.

  “Robert, could you please run the hot water in the tub? I’m going to soak my feet in there.”

  I kissed her forehead and got up.

  “Why do women wear shoes that hurt?” I asked.

  “Because men like the way we walk in them.”

  I walked to the bathroom, wiggling my ass to make her laugh. I kneeled down by the tub and plugged the drain. I turned on the hot water, admiring how clean Paul had kept the tiles.

  I thought about how close he had come to becoming the next Chinatown casualty and now the kid was a responsible young man, much more than I was when I was his age.

  Did those gang kids who were in the banquet room have the same potential? Maybe all they needed was a sense of responsibility and
someone tough who cared about them. The parents were working twelve-hour shifts in sweatshops and restaurants and were pretty short on patience and sleep when they crawled home. The illegals coming in and working longer for less money made everything even worse for everybody.

  I wondered what was happening on the other side of the world, in Fujian. How long did it take human snakes to scrape together the deposit for the snakehead to smuggle them to America? How long did it take for them to realize they were paying to dig their own graves?

  As I leaned on the side of the tub, I realized that it was shaped like an open casket and I felt uneasy. I stood up quickly and looked down at the rippling reflection of my face resting at the head of the coffin.

  16

  “CHOW, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?”

  Vandyne sounded so genuinely worried I looked into his eyes carefully. He really was shaken. I thought I saw flecks of green in his brown pupils. Maybe I wasn’t really awake yet.

  It was about six in the morning. We were sitting at a large round table in a Taiwanese restaurant in the alley that ran mid-block between Elizabeth and Bowery. The table sat up to eight, but we were alone.

  “I’m doing good, man,” I said. “Is everything all right with you?”

  He shook his head and reached for the sugar for his fried-dough stick. I got mine with the oily baked bread sheath the Taiwanese like to shove the stick into, making a bread-bread sandwich. With a bowl of warm soy milk sweetened with some sugar, it was a great way to greet the dawn.

  I had a big bite of the doubled dough in my mouth when Vandyne leaned in and whispered, “I had a dream that you died, Chow.”

  It made it that much harder for me to swallow and gasp, “Jesus fucking Christ, don’t tell me something like that, man! Don’t you know how superstitious Chinese people are?” I spooned warm soy milk quickly into my mouth to clear off the oil film on my tongue.

  “I’m sorry. Let’s just forget it.”

  “The horse is already out of the barn. Tell me what happened in your dream.”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  “Yeah. You’ve already cursed me. Might as well tell me everything.”

  “You were walking along a column of soldiers. I couldn’t see their faces. Then some guy broke out and ran at you. He stabbed you in the chest with a knife.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He had black hair.”

  “I’ll be on the lookout for him.”

  “They were all Asian, Chow. I think it was Nam.”

  “Are you absolutely sure that it wasn’t a flashback you were having? Maybe you were remembering something you had suppressed down there.”

  Vandyne shook his head. “It was a premonition,” he said, dragging one end of the stick through a small sandbar of sugar on his plate. “You can heed it or not.”

  “Even if I wanted to heed it, what would I do? Avoid groups of Asians? Stay in bed all day? I don’t think Paul’s going to change my bedpan.”

  “Just keep it in mind,” said Vandyne, looking out a window to the alley. “Last time I had one of these was when I met Rose. I saw us walking down an aisle.”

  “And the next thing you know, you’re walking through aisles in Macy’s.”

  “No, that was after the wedding, when we went shopping for bedsheets.”

  “That must’ve been fun.”

  “I had another premonition in my life that also came true. I saw my guitar string break when I played the first note to the solo in ‘Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.’ I wasn’t surprised at all when it happened, either, because I knew it was a premonition when I saw it, and the string snapping off felt exactly the same.”

  “Didn’t you just make the string break? You knew it was going to happen, so you subconsciously plucked the string too hard.”

  “It was destined to happen. I wouldn’t have done it on purpose or by accident.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was too good a guitar player to simply snap a string.”

  “I’ve got some great eight-sided Taoist mirrors to sell to you. They’ll deflect all the bad luck heading your way to somebody else.”

  “I already have one,” Vandyne grumbled.

  “I’ll take it as a warning. I’ll watch out, I promise.” I dipped a stick into my bowl of soy milk and swished it around. I watched a slick of grease vibrate on the surface and poured more sugar on top of it.

  “That is kind of like dipping a donut into coffee, Chinese-style,” said Vandyne, who had passed on getting a bowl of soy milk.

  “Why did you get a cup of decaf?” I asked.

  “I’ve been getting irritable. Rose says it’s the caffeine. I think it’s the therapy.”

  “I think you’re getting cranky in your old age.”

  “I’m married. I have a right to be cranky.”

  “I’m in a relationship and I’m still smiling.”

  “Marriage is a whole new level. You have to do a lot of unpleasant but politically good things.”

  “I wouldn’t mind doing anything for Lonnie.”

  “Then go over and have dinner and see a Broadway show with her parents.” I frowned and he laughed. “Don’t get all cranky now, Chow! You love the girl, you gotta love her family.”

  “I already live with her brother. That’s as much of her family as I’ll take for now.”

  I looked at the empty chairs around us.

  “Where do you think she’ll want to sit?” I asked.

  “I think she’ll want to sit right next to you. You are her type, after all.”

  “I don’t want to get involved with someone old enough to be giving me grades and checking my grammar.”

  “You can learn a lot from older women, partner. They’re very worldly and usually pretty well-off. Young buck like you could probably get a lot of nice presents from Irene. New suit, shoes, silk underwear—”

  “Let’s stop there! Sounds like you’ve thought about trying to find a setup like that.”

  “I think it was a movie I saw a while ago.”

  “How did it end?”

  “If I remember correctly, the husband walked in and shot both of them.”

  Irene came in wearing a Chinese shirt with cloth buttons and dark slacks. Eyes turned to her angular white face that sailed over to our table like a comet in time-lapse photography.

  “Irene,” I said, interrupting her bow with a handshake.

  “Thanks for coming,” said Vandyne.

  “Thank you both for accommodating my schedule!” she said, taking a seat one down from me. She set her bulging purse down on the chair between us. “I’ve got a tape recorder in there.”

  “For recording us?” I asked.

  “No, no. I’m interviewing a contemporary poet later. He works down here.”

  “Irene, you’ve said you had some things to tell my partner and me about Mr. Tin.”

  “We do have a close association, you know that,” she said, glancing at me. “There are times we’ve been together when Mr. Tin had some problems to deal with. Sometimes people come up to him and start speaking Mandarin immediately because they don’t think I can understand.”

  “That’s their mistake,” I said.

  “I’ll say. It’s a new racial prejudice,” she said, appealing to Vandyne with one hand on her chest and the other outstretched to him. He responded by crossing his arms.

  “Is there something in particular that happened? Do you know if Mr. Tin is involved with illegal smuggling?”

  “I haven’t heard anything like that, but he’s been helping to hire people that I believe to be illegals to work at various restaurants. One time when I was coming back from the restroom I heard two men talking about Brother Five and ‘piggies.’”

  “Piggies?” I asked. “Is he smuggling livestock?”

  “‘Piggies’ is another term for the people who are being smuggled. It’s similar to ‘human snakes.’ Of course, these are people who are probably handled in a worse manner than livestock.
”

  “We’ve heard of the character ‘Brother Five’ before,” said Vandyne.

  “That’s coded language, also. It may be a name with five strokes in the character. Like ‘Tin.’”

  “Sorry, Irene. ‘Tin’ has six strokes,” I said.

  “No, Robert, it has five,” she said.

  “It’s a field,” I said, with some force. “It’s a four-sided box with a cross in it. Four sides and the two lines inside add up to six.”

  I looked at Vandyne and we nodded to each other.

  “Robert,” started Irene, with a sheepish smile on her face. “You’re wrong. The top of the box and the right side are a single stroke. So it’s a total of five strokes. You’ve forgotten that character strokes are counted by using a brush on paper. I mean if it were clay tablets we were dealing with—”

  “You’re right, Irene,” I said, cutting her off. “I was completely wrong.”

  Goddammit! I had been so sure that Ng was the lead candidate for Brother Five. Mr. Tin was actually just as plausible.

  I took out a Polaroid of Ng and showed it to Irene.

  “Have you seen this man?” I asked.

  She looked it over carefully. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Vandyne.

  “I’m positive I haven’t seen him. He has a very Cantonese face, though.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Cantonese face’?” I shot.

  “I mean the facial structure typical for southern China. Like yours, Robert. A bit elongated to a pointy chin. Similar to a fox. Northern Chinese have stronger, more squarelike heads and are physically bigger overall. Some say more attractive.”

  I took in a deep breath.

  “Irene,” Vandyne said quickly, “let’s lay off the physiology a bit. I can appreciate that you know a lot about the Chinese people and culture, but don’t treat my man like he’s a museum piece and you’re reading the sign next to him.”

  “I didn’t mean to cause offense. I’m just very excited about Chinese culture!”

  “I’m sure you didn’t mean to cause offense,” I said. “In any case, the man in this picture is Andy Ng. I had reason to believe that he is Brother Five. His Cantonese name ‘Ng’—you know it as ‘Wu’—happens to mean ‘five.’ He also eats in the private room of Jade Palace.”