People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

Out of good fortune she believed given her by the shoes of her mother, she was thrown into a truck by someone. She, a child with no emotion on her face by then, no more tears, just unblinking eyes.

  She stayed in the truck, curled up behind the others, and then began to cry as she realized her feet hurt. She wore the shoes but her feet hurt. Someone stopped the truck along the way and she smelled fear. Words were exchanged, but she didn’t understand them from underneath all the human flesh. Someone was made to leave the truck. And somehow she was saved and traveled on, hearing gunshots, she, the girl with little legs and hands, the girl who wore her favorite red flowers sewn onto the tops of her shoes.

  Later, even after the bottoms were worn out, she kept the shoes. They would touch the heart of a woman. Now, an adult, she still has them, in a cloth bag.

  She was a child alone in the city, one of many such children. They walked in the city and back streets at first like ghosts. She had an uncle, but no one knew where he was. She unstitched her dirty jacket so carefully, leaving her father’s picture and address and map still inside, removing her uncle’s address, showing it to people, asking.

  Most tried to avoid her as she seemed to wander aimlessly. A girl with a village face was bad luck. She was one of the Ugly People. She would be sent home or rounded up and reeducated or she would simply die on the street one night. Others who looked at the paper said they had never heard of such a street. Some said, “I don’t read.” Even the cyclo drivers who knew all the parts of town had never heard of this number or name.

  Lin had a few coins, but at first she started her lost life in the city begging for food. “Please,” she would ask a shopkeeper, looking at the soup or noodles or at the fried fish or a pastry wrapped in paper. Sometimes one took pity on her, but usually they sent her away, themselves too poor to give anything away, and too many beggars. Finally, she squatted down and thought hard and made a plan. She decided to stay on one street. Even hungry. She would make herself useful there. They would get to know her. She would make them want to keep her, to feed her, to give her small jobs. She used a broom that had been kept outside a shop which no longer existed and she swept the street made of old gray stones, the walkway, and picked up all the trash. After a while, she was noticed and recognized. Then, finding rags, old clothing, she began to clean the shopkeepers’ windows. When the afternoon rains ceased, she wiped them dry, to a shine. “Hey,” the woman at the florist shop called out. “Get out of here. Stay away from my window!” But this street was clean in a town half bombed and filthy. This one street where some of the communists had moved into the buildings upstairs and sometimes, when no one looked, one of them even tipped her. He looked like the young “uncle,” the one who had been there so suddenly and then been killed. Later, she knew he must have fought for the wrong side then. There were too many sides.

  Every morning, she woke from the tree where she lived, sometimes damp from rain. She combed her hair with a comb she had found that once belonged to an American. Then she went down on her short legs, already an ambitious girl, and swept the streets in front of all the half-surviving businesses. She was a small girl then, and young, with small dimpled hands. Those who saw her on the street and felt sorry for her didn’t show it. They had their lives. And theirs were also sorrowful. She was a child among children and everywhere they walked were children. Sometimes they had an extra coin for her. Sometimes they didn’t. There was no predicting when or what, if anything, decided it. They were all survivors there. No one thought about where she slept at night or what she ate. The town had been broken and everyone was just trying to put their lives together again and even a child understood this.

  Light-years away. This is what she tells herself.

  She still showed everyone her uncle’s address. No one knew of it. One kind man even searched a map of the city. Perhaps the street name had been changed. “To fit the regime, you know,” he explained. “It’s all changed.”

  And there was kindness. Daily the flower keeper’s husband said, “Did you eat yet today?” He slipped her a piece of fruit, and down the street a grocer always gave her a hard-boiled egg. And the woman florist herself sometimes, in spite of herself, slipped her ginger candy, the woman with the square, angular jawbone, arranging the purple orchids, the flowers and green leaves, hurrying from the refrigerator to the ribbon, looking up as if she couldn’t be too careful of the “new regime,” even though the orders now were to renew their businesses. Most things that even hinted of the West had been destroyed and forbidden. Even haircuts and clothing, until it all changed again. But bread was still there. Lin longed for rice, but she settled for anything. The old man at the tea shop on the corner still kept different kinds of breads—the Americans had liked breads—and he gave Lin some of the sweet or still-fresh leftovers. She did well, she thought, with some of the businesses now encouraged by the new regime.

  One day the husband of the florist gave her rice wrapped in a leaf. “Where do you sleep?” he asked. He wore a striped short-sleeved shirt. Behind him were flowers. The room smelled of hibiscus and plumeria. She sniffed the air, her eyes closed. She smelled the rice, then ate it, at first too quickly. In her memory was home, the aroma, the glint of sun on rice fields. And her mother.

  But she told no one where she slept. She didn’t want to be taken away or found in the branches of her giant tree. Even those collecting the leaves for their own memories did not see her in her nest of branches. It was her tree, singing, creaking insects and all. She climbed quickly, like a monkey could climb. Still in the worn shoes made by her mother, she prided herself on that.

  She only pointed in the direction of the park. And at night she walked to the other side of the street, the long way around, so he wouldn’t know.

  But he knew. He took this up with his wife.

  “No,” she said, a pencil always above her ear, her hair piled high. “No one is going to live in here. We hardly have room as it is. There are kids all over the streets. We would get caught. Who knows, we could be fined or worse. Here. Forget it and get on your bike and deliver these flowers. Here’s the place.” She handed him a map and note.

  He held the directions, but continued to talk about the girl. “But on this street, who would tell? We all know her. She cleans it up so pretty and even that cruel boy above the grocery, he gives her a coin some days. I see him.”

  The woman set her jaw tight and waved him away.

  Sometimes, too, a coin was slipped to her by the florist’s husband who also stole from the money box for himself. Lin kept silent about this. They had a secret pact. He didn’t tell that he helped her, she didn’t tell that he went to the square and gambled with cards and dice. Sometimes he let her wash her hair so she wouldn’t get lice like the others who lived out there on streets or alleyways. The woman herself was usually too busy to notice and perhaps, truly, she wouldn’t have cared anyway, but the husband and Lin felt like conspirators and they enjoyed it. Nevertheless, the woman became suspicious when the man lost too much. The woman, thinking the missing money was because of Lin, said, “You give the girl money. Or maybe she takes it. I think she could be a thief.”

  “No. I don’t. I give her nothing. She doesn’t take it, either. It was the boy,” he lied. “He came in today. I had to pay him again not to break the windows.”

  “Ai, him again.”

  But Lin thought the woman knew more than she said.

  And yet Lin had the soft palms of a child and a sweetness about her and the woman softened now and then, and gave her a meal with sweet rice and sometimes mango.

  Because of the kindness and persistent pleading of the shopkeeper’s husband, Lin was given a job at the flower shop cleaning. She cleaned the dark green doorway. She cleaned up the leaves and petals that fell on the yellow floor.

  “Sometimes I think of her as a niece,” the man said.

  His wife did not smile at this. She thought of her own daughter, the one now killed.

  Then one afternoon as it rained an
d while they were closed for their afternoon naps, Lin fell asleep on the floor of the shop in the back room and she had a dream and began screaming and she cried like a child.

  The woman went to her. “It’s all right. Shh.” Then she saw her shoes, her feet showing through the bottom, cracked and scarred and looking sore. She began to think, for the first time, of the girl’s history, and for the first time, that Lin was just a child, a very young child, not a threat or a problem. She considered where she might have come from, what she might have seen. One part of her thought, well, hadn’t they all? But then, instead of thinking that the girl, like everyone else, was just another taker, a small contriving adult, the woman picked her up and held her against her heart, feeling a movement of her own grief, how small Lin was, a girl like her daughter had once been. Now only a picture on her altar. The man watched, his own eyes with tears, thinking of the child they had lost when the communists stormed Saigon and everyone tried to escape.

  “She sleeps in the park,” he said. “I think she came from the Delta. I think she escaped the Khmer. Maybe she’s from Cambodia and not where I think. I can’t be sure, but I think I see them in her eyes at times. I see the face of Buddha.”

  “Don’t say that word.”

  Soon the flower woman decided to keep Lin in a corner of their space, “Over here. Over here.” She sounded impatient. “You sleep there.” She arranged a mat on the floor, a covering, losing her pencil in it.

  One night Lin found a new pair of shoes beside the mat on the floor. They were only plastic and they were white, but they fit and she was happy. She tucked her other shoes in beneath her little pile of things and then one day the woman left her a pair of pants.

  Yet Mrs. could change without notice. Again one day, she said, “I think the girl is taking money.”

  “No, no.” Finally, her husband sat down and confessed. “It isn’t her. I am the one. I take the money some days.”

  “What? You? You are just lying to protect her.”

  “No. I admit it, I go play cards. It’s only a little money.”

  “You monkey! You idiot! You waster!” She picked up the broom as if to chase him away, but then put it back down. “Maybe you need to work harder. Now Lin will deliver flowers. You clean.”

  As a child, Lin grew too fast and her bones ached. The florist, wearing her hairnet, soothed her knobby knees with a Chinese liniment in a green bottle. When that didn’t work, she used a Korean oil. It was a bottle that came in a tin because the cap leaked in every single bottle. On the front of it was a girl that looked like Lin, with black bangs. Still Lin hurt. And the woman decided it was chemicals from the war, or the poison smoke, because Lin was from the country. Again her compassion bloomed like her plants. Until she misplaced a ring or bracelet, and then she would think once again that Lin was a thief.

  Eventually Mr. arranged a heavy cloth curtain and also a doorway with a deluge of green plastic beads hanging down to separate Lin from them.

  Lin was paid a weekly amount. She delivered flowers and she cooked. At night she studied English.

  As Lin grew older the flower woman, her back bent a little more, gave her a little more space separated by a piece of cloth the color of lilies and fine enough that a breeze carried the scent of flowers to her mat. The curtain moved and, as they napped in the afternoon, she watched the cloth in the air change colors like a cloud, and watched its soft movement. She thought, as she daydreamed, as she dozed, of her father. She lay on her side and sometimes took out his picture, quietly, so as not to be heard.

  She went to secret classes at night. She had a hunger for knowledge. Because there were no schools, they met nights at the teahouse on the corner. Dr. Bread-baker, she called the man who had been a soldier once, taught English, reading, and writing, even algebra with the missing equation. Someday she would go to her father. They could not know who her father was. It would change their view of her to know that she was half American. She felt guilty about this. When she saw the other children of American fathers who had no place to stay, no food, she gave them coins and hard-boiled eggs.

  She was bamboo, growing so fast, so lovely, so fluent you could read all of it on her narrow face, all her feelings and languages. There were old songs inside her, and the sound wind makes as it passes through the bamboo forest.

  She remembered, later, on the afternoons she rested, some of them. She remembered the line of people on the road, having to leave with their babies and goods. She remembered leaving her grandmother crying in the boat, Grandmother with a pot of flowers and the chicken, something alive that she hadn’t lost and thought she needed and Lin with her fish. She cried when she remembered this. But no one knew if they were “Yards” who assisted the Americans, communists, or ordinary villagers and whichever, they were threatening to any of the groups, as if there had been no such thing any longer as a simple human being, a villager. The child she had been was an enemy to someone. Everyone was one kind of enemy or another. Even a child, a little girl who carried a jar with a red goldfish in it.

  The flower business grew. As it became more prosperous, they built a wall and even a door that opened and closed. Lin arranged her place just so, everything in order, a teapot and two cups, a jar of flowers, a pillow, her box of things, including her father’s map and his name and address in America. Later the husband built Lin shelves for her things and added hooks for her clothing. Sometimes Lin made enough extra money at tips and small jobs that she could buy a Coca-Cola or, better, a silk blouse. Lin grew. She loved the returning forest and as she grew older she went there each day in the morning mist. Tall and narrow, with a single braid of black hair, she walked into the clouds. She returned looking radiant. Everyone noticed her. They saw her beauty.

  “Isn’t our Lin lovely?” said the old man to his wife as she lavished cream on her face.

  “Our Lin.” She snorted, unable to admit to herself her own feelings for the growing girl. And yet one day, a year or so back, she had gone to Lin’s mat and put her arm around the sleeping girl and cried into Lin’s hair. Lin heard her sobs.

  In the hot afternoons after they closed down for a rest, all would bustle again. It rained. The streets ran with water. Now and then she’d still see an ox. Work lasted until night when everyone visited with their neighbors and talked about each other, how Doc Thin Yu’s daughter had come home, and how well they had done for the day. Even if they lied about it, even if their business was on the edge of broken, they said, “We had an excellent day.”

  “Ours, too, was very good.”

  The bread-baker had been a scholar once. A professor. She learned from him, even when school was still against the law in the changed world. At his place she looked at the globe. She closed her delicate eyes and she pointed. Turkey. She wanted to go there, and she would because, above all, in her softness, her greenness, she was stubborn and willful. She pointed again. Midland, Ohio. Maybe not. But then perhaps it was exotic. Perhaps it was close to her father. How she wanted to see him. But for now, she was happy enough riding her bicycle through city streets, getting off and pushing it, seeing the look of happiness pass over someone’s face when she delivered flowers for her boss woman, and looking at everything there was to see, women washing the windows of shops or cleaning the walk in front, green forcing its way through old stone.

  Lin liked to watch the people mostly, a woman rushing by with a new haircut and a plastic bag of something no doubt beautiful in her slender right hand. Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, had changed.

  And then she’d enter the trees and stop, enchanted. She walked the bike through this world. The trees were her place. Jungle was her blood. Ocean was, too, but she didn’t yet know it.

  Lin had her father’s map, along with his photograph. She didn’t know that the dirty, folded, and rough-edged paper was a valuable thing. It was a book against the Americans. It told of those who crossed over into a country not theirs for war. It told of unlawful boundaries crossed, beliefs, places, and even bodies trespassed
.

  In class, it was easy for Lin to understand the dialects of others, as if some were a trace in her memory. And they also spoke English, from her childhood, but her own people had spoken many languages and dialects because they had to.

  In her long-distant past old Uncle Song would gather them together and they would practice. “No, no,” he would say. “Do you want to get killed? You pronounce it this way or they will think you are an enemy.” They’d laugh. They couldn’t cry. It was a world of many enemies, each with their own intonation of voice, of belief, of hatred.

  “Ha! I am an enemy!” said Auntie with great gusto, a woman with a white streak of hair who hated all those around them, but she then looked vulnerable and her lip didn’t hold as firm. Her face, the mask, would soften into nothing that hated, only what feared. Lin remembered this, even though at the time she was perhaps only five or six.

  The older people already spoke French. “From before.” That was part of their history. Some even spoke Chinese, she was certain. But the man on the corner taught her new dialects and better French. She was a fast learner. Dr. Bread-baker also taught her algebra, her favorite because she was always seeking the mystery of x. It was the important factor in her life where everything was missing, lost, and sought-after. She was always searching, this young woman, this very fast learner he favored.

  She looked up the word war and found that it meant confusion more than any other one verb and it was not the noun it was thought to be. It meant hostilities, armed battle. She had never understood why humans did not live in peace, which seemed so easy, so simple compared to war. She asked Dr. Thieu, the baker, and he said he believed it was in the human’s nature to seek power and to have greed. “Even a simple, peaceful woman or man will fight back when they see injustice or when something is taken from them,” he said. “Oh, I have come to believe it is a necklace of skulls, a chain linked together with no clasp, and it is so strong it can’t be broken. Humans are poor, unforgiving animals.”