by Quan Barry
Rabbit extended her arm. Son put the second bird, still in training, on her wrist. At two feet tall it towered over her head. We don’t need the cage tonight, she said, brushing her cheeks in its ragged feathers. A few months back she had argued with Huyen. It’s what people expect, Huyen had said. You can’t always be there, the old woman added. A customer had come back and said his bird had flown away. After the man was gone, Huyen took the cleaver off its peg and opened one of the cages with a new bird in it. Rabbit climbed over the railing into the sampan. She put her fingers in her ears as Huyen slammed the cleaver down on the bird’s wing, clipping its best feathers. Huyen breathed heavily as she worked her way through, her teeth the same color as markings on the bird’s head and beak.
Unlike other fishing birds, the cormorant couldn’t swallow underwater. It had to surface with its catch. Most fishermen fitted small bands made of cane around the bird’s throat, the poorer fishermen simply tying a piece of string just below the gullet. When the bird resurfaced, the fisherman would pull the string tight, keeping the bird from swallowing. Time and again Huyen would tell customers the string wasn’t necessary. If you respect the bird, she would say, it will respect you. Hers were the best fishers on the river.
Son stood upright paddling in the back of the sampan, Binh preening on his shoulder. The stars were out and the air was muggy. The last time he had gone out alone with Rabbit, Phuong had carried on when the two of them got back even though one of the fish they caught was the length of his arm. Rabbit was lucky that way. Qui couldn’t talk. The front of her shirt was always wet, her pale face with the large eyes so filled with beauty his uncles never talked about her, as if the mere mention of her radiance were a kind of sacrilege. On the other hand Phuong was always yelling. Ever since his father had disappeared in one of the reeducation camps, Phuong was beside herself over the littlest things, wailing that if anything ever happened to him, who would take care of her? He was nine years old. There were other boys younger than him who went out fishing by themselves, their fathers dead or off clearing land in the new economic zones. Phuong didn’t care. Even when her own brothers told her to let him be, she would acquiesce during the day, letting him go with them to the black market in Cantho to sell any extra rice. When he came back home, it was a different story. Nights on the leaking floor she slept with her arms around him.
Rabbit didn’t even turn to face him. The Dragon’s Head, she said. Son kept paddling east toward the stars in the Winnowing Basket. We need the money, Rabbit said. Please. A bat swooped by his ear almost knocking him off-balance. He tried to remember the last time he’d heard her say please, but nothing came to mind. She was a seven-year-old girl who spoke like an old man, addressing everyone with the pronouns meant for inferiors, her freckles cowing adults into silence. Once, unthinkingly, Rabbit had called Huyen em, and Huyen had slapped her. Son’s older sister, Sang, liked to say that Rabbit was a tiger girl and that one day her tiger blood would get him killed.
Son sighed and swung the sampan toward the stars of the Black Tortoise. He thought of the things Huyen had told them about the river. The Mekong was a series of rivers that originated in the icy mountains of Tibet and reached the South China Sea through a network of tributaries south of Saigon. It branched and forked and twisted for almost three thousand miles, the dark brown surface deceptively calm. Anywhere two or more branches met there was a dangerous current as the two rivers became one. At its widest, the Mekong stretched more than seven miles from shore to shore.
The Mekong is our mother, Huyen had said. She gives us fish and birds and a place to live. The old woman put her hand in the river and scooped up a handful. She will kill you without shedding a tear, Huyen added. In her palm the water gleamed an impenetrable brown, silt-rich. Sometimes when he wanted to hide, all Son had to do was jump in and hold his breath.
He was steering toward a spot where three fingers met a tributary called the Sap River, the waters originating from Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap. By sampan it was almost an hour. He tried not to think of the way his mother would lock her arms around him when he got home. A bird that could fish the Dragon’s Head was worth double, though if you fell out of the boat, it wouldn’t matter to you how much the bird was worth.
Son had only been there once with his uncles in a boat with a small engine. They’d gone to look for river otters. The animal’s bladder could be sold for three months’ wages in the fields, the glistening sack smoked and pulverized for Chinese medicine. Otters were drawn to the Dragon’s Head because of the types of fish the fast water attracted. Son had talked his uncles into bringing Rabbit along. She’ll be able to hear them, he said. She’s small. She knows where things like to hide. At the time his uncle Duc had intended to say no, but something about the little girl with the cluster of freckles and the boy’s haircut standing there looking him right in the face as if she were his elder gave him pause. The next thing he knew she was in the front of the boat.
In their first ten minutes at the Dragon’s Head, Rabbit had pointed to some dead saplings snagged in a mass of weeds. Duc managed to scoop the creature up in a net. The thing was obviously a baby, its coloring still tawny but glistening in the light. Then Hai, Son’s youngest uncle, brained it, holding it by the hind legs as he smashed it twice on the side of the boat. When he was done, Son could see what looked like chunks of pink sponge coming out of its ears. Within seconds the flies began to clot. Rabbit rode the rest of the way in silence. Something about the impassive look on her face, as if she were seeing all the way to the ends of the earth. Though they wouldn’t admit it, none of the grown men could bring themselves to disturb her. They came home with just the one lying like a tattered sock in their net.
Overhead Son searched the sky for the pale green second star in the Willow, his birth sign, but the moon was too bright. He knew even his uncles would be upset. Night with just a bamboo oar and no rope and him ferrying his childhood friend to the killing heart of the river. The worst part about it, his uncles would say as they sat drinking the ruou nep in the light of the fire, the sweet wine distilled from sticky rice, was that there was really nothing in it for him. He had a heart like his dead father, An, they would conclude—like An, he put everyone else ahead of himself.
After a while Son changed course again, steering the sampan the final stretch toward the Great Emptiness in the western sky. How to explain? Sometimes with Rabbit you chose to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. You became bigger than who you were. Wasn’t that what the Buddha taught? He didn’t think his uncles would understand. And with the government’s new policies in place, in a few short months everyone had forgotten how they used to live. Son could still remember the old way of harvesting rice, everyone out in their neighbor’s fields, everyone lending a hand, the whole village prospering together. And how at the end of the harvest the village would celebrate by hiring a water puppet troupe to perform, the papery creatures as if walking on the surface of the flooded paddies. Yes. The thing his uncles would chide him for was the thing he missed most about his father. When An was with you, he would do anything you needed—climb any tree, till any paddy, or just carry you on his thin shoulders even when you could have walked. Now that the government had collectivized the countryside, declaring everything belonged to everyone, it had had the opposite effect—it made the whole world less willing to be generous. Now nobody gave his neighbor a hand at harvest time. Each farmer was left to struggle on his own. Once Son had heard his uncle Hai say it was a good thing An was dead because this new world would’ve killed him.
Son steered the boat past a fisherman floating on a makeshift raft. The man’s fire had gone out. A fishing bird huddled at the man’s feet, but there was something strange about the creature. Son wondered if the bird’s wings were rotting. Unlike other seabirds, cormorants didn’t produce oil. Every day you had to let them out of their cages to stand in the sun, or their feathers would become waterlogged. With a wingspan of over four feet, if they stayed wet long enough, their
soggy feathers could become heavy as weights, in time their own wings drowning them.
A match, the man said as the two children passed by, the man gesturing as if lighting a cigarette. It was more a command than a request. Son looked to Rabbit. Ever since the government had begun collectivizing the farms, robbery was on an uptick. Rabbit studied the man. His conical hat obscured his face, though she could see his long gray beard falling to his chest. He was leaning toward them, one hand invisible under the water. She shook her head. Son kept paddling. He could feel Binh’s feet tightening on his shoulder. He knew his father would’ve stopped to help.
Within minutes he could hear the shift in the current. He kept the boat near shore. Even then he had to throw all his weight into it, the speed of their progress cut in half. There was no way he could row them out into the middle. If he did, it would be like shooting a rapid, the water sending them sailing downstream in unpredictable ways. They were still a half mile from where the waters converged, but it was close enough. In the moonlight he could see things tornadoing past, mostly sticks and weeds but other objects as well, things bloated and shiny.
You sure about this, he said. Already she was picking the smaller bird off her wrist. Even if it comes up with all the Buddha’s gold, he said, who’s going to believe us? Rabbit glared. Son felt his face growing red. It was true. Nobody would question it. Adults believed every word she said.
He reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a book of matches. Out here it was a formality. The light wouldn’t make a difference in the fast water. He walked to the front of the boat, the sampan rocking, and raked his fingers through the basket full of twigs and leaves they kept on board. With one match he got it lit.
It was the ancient art of fishing. After dark all over the Mekong, men in boats would position baskets of fire on long poles out over the water, the innumerable flames like a flock of moons, then up out of the depths shadows massed on the surface of the river, each one attracted to the light, moths to the flame, and splash! The bird dives over the edge into the darkness, thrashing about momentarily, and resurfaces only to be hauled up by the fisherman. And when he whistles, the bird opens its beak, and the man reaches in and pulls one out, the bond between man and bird sealed, the fish’s long silver body flashing in the firelight. At the end of the night, the horizon pinking, the fishermen load the birds back into their wicker cages, the men’s movements gentle, deferential, as if they were handling gods, each man placing a dark hood over the bird’s crested head and dousing the flame, putting the feathered god to sleep.
Son slid the basket of fire out over the side of the boat. Here the river was so fast the light wouldn’t attract anything other than insects, but he did it all the same.
Rabbit had her face buried in the bird’s feathers. She was talking to it with her eyes closed. Son couldn’t hear what she was saying. He knew her words were building a fire in the bird. He closed his eyes and tried to pretend. Someday he wanted someone to talk to him like that.
Rabbit perched the bird on the lip of the boat. The basket of fire swung over the water as the sampan rocked in the current. It was a narrow point in the river, less than a quarter mile from shore to shore, the water gray in the moonlight. The bird extended its snakelike neck as if limbering up, its dark grace mesmerizing.
Go. Rabbit’s command echoed inside Son’s head. He hadn’t even seen her lips move. The bird opened its black wings. He could see where the pattern had been interrupted by Huyen’s cleaver. Clipping could be tricky. Hit a blood feather and the animal could bleed to death.
The bird fluttered down onto the water. Already it was moving away, its powerful feet all but invisible. Son put his hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. It would all be decided under the surface. The bird would slip under, then the animal would have to call on both its feet and wings to power it back up against the crushing water. Once it dove, everything would happen quickly.
Thirty feet upstream there was a series of rocks studded in the river. The one time out with his uncles they had pulled to shore at the end of the day. Something was choking the engine. While they waited for Duc to clear it, Hai had climbed out on the nearest rock and lit a cigarette. Once Duc got the engine going they were ready to leave, but Hai was still lying on a rock, his shirt off as he lay sunning himself. Hey lady, Duc had called. Get over here or we’ll leave your flat ass. Now in the moonlight Son noticed the rocks strung across the river, each one silent and black.
A halo of insects was swarming around the fire. On his shoulder Binh’s feet were starting to make his skin sweat. He missed the exact moment when the bird went under. One minute its long loose neck swayed like an S, the next it was gone.
They waited. Far away downriver pinpricks of light twinkled, whole universes being born and falling dead. Then Son could see it, the great neck craning. He could see the fish in its mouth. Even at a distance the whiskers on the fish’s face were thick as wire. And of its own free will the bird was making straight for them with its offering, coming to lay the great fish at Rabbit’s feet.
Neither of them saw it. It must have been sitting on the rocks waiting for the bird to rise, the pattern of stripes and spots helping it to melt into the darkness, the animal keeping its eye on the water, anticipating the spot where the bird would surface, its muscles tensing, its whiplike reflexes ingrained in the blood.
The cat leaped. It hit the bird square at the base of the throat. Even from where they were sitting they could hear the sound of the bird’s neck snapping. It looked twice as big as a normal fishing cat, though the two black spots on the back of its ears were the usual markings. Son was still watching the animal gripping its prize in its jaws, eyes coated with night sheen, when he suddenly fell backward in the sampan as the boat shot out into the middle of the river.
At first he thought they’d been hit by a river croc. He sat back up and looked around for the two yellow eyes. Straight ahead he could see the rocks jutting up out of the water. The fishing cat had changed course. It was swimming straight for the rock farthest from shore.
Son held on to both sides of the boat. The water was swamping them. The sampan began to break apart. Rabbit was standing in the back, the bamboo oar in her hands. He knew she had set the boat in motion, that she was aiming for the fishing cat, but the sampan went sideways in the water, the boat caving in from the force. He was still sitting on what remained of the floor, Binh somehow still on his shoulder. Rabbit let the oar fall from her hands. She closed her eyes. Son imagined she was already in the silvery room inside her head. If the moment were frozen, she would have looked as if she were standing on water.
Then the boat overturned. Son went under and came back up, a flame guttering in the breeze. He took in as much air as he could. Underwater it was hard to tell which way was up. He imagined a room with no doors or windows, no up or down, the room a perfect sphere. Then he imagined a wild animal materializing in the room. That’s what it felt like when he would slip under—a wild animal tearing at him in a room with no way out.
The current was stronger than he’d expected, stronger than the monsoon winds that tore roofs off houses. I am going to drown. It was as if somebody else were thinking it, a third party outside himself. He thought of the voices inside Rabbit’s head and the way she would paw at her ears. He wondered if he would become one of them. He was swept downriver, a piece of flotsam. He considered just letting go. The Buddha promised a special wheel of life for children. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
He surfaced again, his lungs on fire. Something was poking him in the back, trying to hook his shirt. He felt it take. He was being dragged through the water. Then a hand reached down and grabbed him by the arm and swung him up out of the river. For a long time he lay retching.
It was the man he and Rabbit had left in the dark, the one who had asked for a match. The man’s raft was a patchwork of logs. His long gray beard shimmered in the moonlight. You’re breathing, the old man grunted, then he went back to scanning the river.
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Without Rabbit, Son wished he were dead. He imagined the front of Qui’s shirt, how it would never stop weeping, her long hair tangled in knots. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. He pictured a room on the moon. Could Rabbit hear his voice? Rabbit, it’s me, he thought, say something, but all he could hear was the sound of the river flexing beneath him.
When Son opened his eyes again, the old man’s bird was standing over him. He could smell its musk. There was something different about the bird, its feathers strangely silver in the moonlight, almost colorless, its eyes as if filled with blood. The man was squatting at the edge of the raft and stroking with a crude paddle. Son struggled to sit up. One side of his face was aching where he had scratched it on a branch. Downriver he could see something, a black V floating on the water.
It was Binh. The bird had opened her wings and was marking the spot. Rabbit was drifting on her back and looking up at the stars, the bird floating beside her head. As the raft drifted closer, Son could see there was no panic in her face. Mày là con heo! Son said. You dumb pig! The old man laughed, his long gray beard rippling. You two married, he asked. He reached over and pulled Rabbit out of the water. She had lost her shirt in the current and was naked from the waist up, her ribs distinct as fingers.
The man placed Rabbit down on the raft. He picked up his oar again and continued paddling. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, his gray beard fluttering in the breeze. You’re one of the Dinhs, he said. Son nodded.
They came around the bend that opened up into the cove where the houses of Ba Nuoc sat floating on the river. All were silent and dark except for Rabbit’s. Even from a distance they could hear a chorus of voices carrying over the water. A throng of sampans was tied up out front.