Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

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Charlie Chan Is Dead 2 Page 29

by Jessica Hagedorn


  But the next Sunday it snowed, so much so that Dev couldn’t tell his wife he was going running along the Charles. The Sunday after that, the snow had melted, but Miranda made plans to go to the movies with Laxmi, and when she told Dev this over the phone, he didn’t ask her to cancel them. The third Sunday she got up early and went out for a walk. It was cold but sunny, and so she walked all the way down Commonwealth Avenue, past the restaurants where Dev had kissed her, and then she walked all the way to the Christian Science center. The Mapparium was closed, but she bought a cup of coffee nearby and sat on one of the benches in the plaza outside the church, gazing at its giant pillars and its massive dome, and at the clear-blue sky spread over the city.

  MANGO

  Christian Langworthy

  1

  My brother and I were the sons of my mother’s clients. We never knew their names. Whenever we asked our mother about them, she wouldn’t say much. She just said they were both killed in the war between the North and the South. She said one father died in a helicopter accident; the other was ambushed while crossing a bridge. Mother told the same story to all of our neighbors, and often smiled as she recounted the details. She never cried when she told these stories. Mother even laughed once, when she admitted to a woman how she loved my brother’s father more than she loved mine.

  Mother’s clients were all around us, on the street corners and in the pool halls. They were prison guards, truck drivers, mechanics, and pilots. They were sergeants and majors, captains and corporals. They lived on the military bases, in their Quonset huts and in clusters of green tents. I watched them as they performed their duties in the prisons, on the streets, or on the landing zones. I watched them pilot their Huey and Chinook helicopters. My brother and I caught the bubble gum they threw from the back of deuce-and-a-half trucks as their convoys rumbled by. I was fascinated with the soldiers and their weapons of war. They were my heroes.

  Born in Danang, Vietnam, in 1967, CHRISTIAN LANGWORTHY is the author of a chapbook of poems entitled The Geography of War. His fiction and poetry have been selected for anthologies such as Bold Words, Both Sides Now, Watermark, Premonitions, Poetry Nation, Tilting the Continent, Vietnam Forum, and Asian American Poetry. He is currently writing a novel, from which this story is excerpted.

  Sometimes I took my brother out to the streets to imitate the way the soldiers walked and carried their rifles. We played war games on the streets with the neighborhood boys. Every military piece of trash that we found became a prized possession: belt buckles, brass shells, helmet liners, or canteens. But the most prized items were live rounds. We would try to fire the rounds, striking the priming caps with nails or dropping them off rooftops onto cement. Sometimes we unscrewed the bullets from their brass casings and used the black powder to make firecrackers that we lobbed like grenades over the neighbors’ walls.

  We pretended to be soldiers. We marched on the streets with the men in the green uniforms. In the afternoons, we staged gunfights and skirmishes in deserted alleys. Sometimes we marched down to the canal or to the harbor and pretended that we were being shipped off to war and, like soldiers, we waved good-bye to our loved ones.

  My mother’s clients talked to us in a language we didn’t understand. They patted our shoulders and handed us candy. The men who stayed for more than a day bought us toys like boxing gloves and battery-powered jets. My mother would leave during the day and come back late at night. If she returned with a client we would hear whispers and hushed voices.

  One afternoon, in the height of the rainy season, my brother and I slept in the back room of the bungalow behind a makeshift bamboo partition. It was dark in the bungalow when we were awakened, suddenly disturbed. Through the pattering of the raindrops, we heard voices groaning. Being curious, we both crept out to the front room, which was lit by a hurricane lamp. On a table in the center of the room, a soldier was bending over Mother. My brother and I approached the table and walked around it. Mother told us to go back to sleep, but we ignored her and watched. She was wearing a blouse, but was naked from the waist down. The soldier’s green trousers hung around his ankles. His hips moved up and down like he was trying to climb on top of her. We circled the table several times. We giggled. We hoped to catch them kissing. The soldier said something, and Mother yelled at us, “Dung! Sa! You’re not done napping!”

  We ran to the back room, where we pretended to be asleep. Lying on our mats on the floor, we heard the man yell at Mother and then we heard the door slam shut.

  Sa and I waited for Mother in the back room. We heard her as she put on her pants. It was so quiet that I could hear water from the rain gutters dripping into the cistern behind the bungalow. I tried to count each drop as it plunked into the cistern. After a while, we peeked around the bamboo partition. Mother sat at the table. She was counting stacks of bills by the light of the hurricane lamp. She looked at us and, without a word, went back to her counting. We moved around her with tentative steps. A cold draft slid through the open doorway into the room, and it seemed Mother’s anger would never end. Geckos darted through the doorway. The rain fell harder, drumming on the tin roofs of the shantytown. The alley was flooded. The water came right up to our door. I heard a bread boy clapping teak sticks as he slogged his way through the rain.

  “Baguettes!” he yelled, followed by the clap, clap of his sticks. Mother went to the bungalow door to answer his call. She bought two loaves of bread and paid him with a fresh, stiff bill. She pulled the loaves out of a damp paper bag and the room filled with the smell of yeast. Mother always did nice things for us after spending time with her clients. We broke the loaves in half and crumbs of crust fell to the floor. The baguettes were still warm and a happy feeling rose inside me. I felt it coming up as I ate the bread. I looked at Sa. He was happy too. Mother’s anger was gone, and she let us sit next to her at the table as we ate.

  Monsoon season passed. The men in the green uniforms entered and left our lives. They parked their Jeeps on the street, dusted themselves off with their field caps and trampled down our alley. They stepped out of rickshaws and looked toward our bungalow with their hands hidden in their pants pockets or tucked behind the buckles of pistol belts.

  Mother usually went to her clients and left us to ourselves, but increasingly, they were sleeping in our bungalow. Sometimes from behind the bamboo partition, I heard their movements throughout the night. My ears strained to catch every little sound as they shifted the weight of their bodies—every rasp of an elbow as they brushed against each other on the sleeping mats. Sometimes my ears caught each moan or grunt, and each word they whispered. But occasionally, the roar of the jet bombers and the blades of the helicopters somewhere in the sky masked the sounds that they made.

  Eventually, Sa and I associated the sounds of the helicopters with the presence of the soldiers, her clients. Sometimes the helicopters flew so low over the treetops we could see the faces of the pilots. On some days, we saw the soldiers who sat inside the helicopters with rucksacks on their laps and rifles between their knees. Whenever I heard the helicopters, I ran out from the bungalow to see if a soldier was nearby.

  Sometimes in the evenings when Sa and I came home from the streets, we found Mother entertaining her clients. One man wrestled with us after he had wrestled with Mother. Another man was taken away by MPs who knocked on our door in the middle of the night. Whenever we could we slept with Mother, but the soldiers took most of her nights. It was only during the afternoons when temperatures were too hot to do anything that Mother napped with us in the cool air of the bungalow and held us in her arms.

  One day, Sa and I came home to escape from the midday heat. A soldier was with Mother. She told us that he was staying for a little while. There was something about the way he looked at Mother that I did not like—the way his teeth showed, or how he rested the knuckles of his fists on his hips. My stomach felt sick. Sa went into the bungalow and lay down, but I ran out down the long alley and back into the street.

  I sea
rched for a stick, a long piece of metal, anything, but all that I could find was an ice cream stick broken lengthwise down the middle. Wielding the ice cream stick like a knife, I headed back to the bungalow. I stomped past a small garden plot and local water well with its iron pump handle down. Mother and her client had come out to look for me. I confronted them near a neighbor’s clothesline, where some white bedsheets hung.

  “I’ll kill you,” I shouted at the soldier and waved the ice cream stick threateningly. “Go away.”

  The soldier didn’t understand what I had said, but he understood my body language. He laughed and nervously slapped a field cap against his thigh. Mother was furious. She was about to hit me, but the soldier stopped her. He pulled money from his pockets and extended his hand. He said something in his foreign language. I saw the colorful bills he waved in front of my eyes. I looked at the soldier and then at Mother. The white bedsheets billowed behind her. “Take it,” she said.

  I grabbed the money. I ran to the nearest street vendor, where I bought a pop pistol and a packet of red strip-paper ammo. Tearing open the plastic packet, I loaded the pistol with a strip of ammo. All afternoon, I ran up and down the streets, past the comic book stands, past the shoeshine boys and girls, and I shot at people. Then I ran to the temple grounds and shot the monks sitting on moss-covered steps guarded on both sides by stone dragons. I scampered across the railroad tracks into the local market and shot the merchants squatting over baskets of squid and shrimp. I shot the cloth vendors unrolling bolts of silk and linen. Then the lanes between the vending stalls became too crowded, so I left the market to roam the streets again and kept shooting until it was safe to go home.

  2

  Days passed. I wondered if the soldier who gave me money would ever come back. I wondered about the war. I didn’t know what it was about, but I was told that the Communists were bad. Sometimes Sa and I talked about the war and what kind of heroes our fathers might have been.

  We didn’t see much of the war, though it was never far away. It was on the other side of the canal, over the hills in the mountains and jungle. We never saw the battles or the skirmishes in the swamps and paddies. To us the war was the distant thunder of howitzers, the shudder of our bungalow door, the helicopter blades whipping the air. It was green and yellow star clusters flaring across the moonless skies, the prison searchlights and the air raid sirens. It was the sand-filled burlap bags of the bomb shelter and the faces of strangers springing from the dark under the lantern light. The war was the muffled reports of assault rifles somewhere in the jungle, the cadences of soldiers marching through the streets of Da Nang. It was orange-robed monks leading funeral processions through streets littered with the fresh dung of oxen.

  Sometimes the war was sticks of incense burned for prayer, sometimes olive-green tin cans of C rations labeled with black stars. Sometimes it was canisters of spilled chemicals and sun-blistered barrels of tar in the slums and shantytowns where we lived. But the war was mostly news over the radio and stories overheard from our neighbors. Stories of the death of a son, father, or distant cousin. Stories like the one Mother told of how our fathers died. I imagined what must have happened to my father as Mother told neighbors her version of the story. While my mother and her friends drank tea in the afternoons and read the veins of tea leaves held over candles to tell their fortunes, I saw my father crossing a bridge over a narrow river. I saw the hump of the rucksack on his back, his ammo clips, and his rifle. I imagined the pineapple grenade arcing in the sky and bouncing on the wooden planks of the bridge. Then Mother would tell the story of how Sa’s father died: how he had run from an exploding helicopter on a landing zone and how a rotor blade had cut off his head.

  We never knew for sure if the stories were true, but we assumed our fathers died the deaths of heroes. Sometimes we thought our fathers were still alive, that they walked the streets of Da Nang. We thought that they would pull up in a Jeep or jump out of a helicopter that landed nearby. We wanted to find our fathers. We often searched the faces of the soldiers patrolling the streets and sometimes we mistook a client for a father. Whenever Sa and I were alone with Mother, we asked her about our fathers. We asked her about them during the typhoons that trapped us in our bungalow.

  Once during a typhoon, as Mother lit sticks of incense to pray to the Buddha in our bungalow, Sa asked her if she had a picture of his father. She shook her head, knelt down, and prayed for our safety. Though she said no, we always wondered if she had the photographs. We wondered if she hid the photographs in a footlocker given to her by one of her clients. She kept it locked up in a far corner of the bungalow and was always careful to guard its contents from our eyes. The footlocker was a box full of secrets. As the typhoon winds ripped up the corrugated tin roofs of the shantytown and flung the roofs like paper into the air and whipped the rain against our door, we begged Mother to let us see what was in the footlocker. Then we asked her questions about our fathers and questions about America.

  “What did he look like?” we each asked her, as the typhoon winds howled and water seeped underneath the door.

  “You’ll see one day,” she said.

  Over the course of the typhoon, we haggled her with more questions, but her answers were always brief and vague while she pretended to be busy counting her bills and coins and stuffing them in empty tea boxes stacked up against the bungalow wall that faced the Buddha.

  The typhoon ended. The floodwaters receded from the alley, and we could walk out to the streets again. The men in the green uniforms returned to the doorsteps of our bungalow. They strolled down our alley dressed in fatigues, wearing web belts and shoulder harnesses and holstered pistols. They jumped off the backs of deuce-and-a-halves in the various greens of their camouflage, in drab olive-green fatigues with deep pockets and worn-out mechanic’s greens mired with oil and dirt from repairing the engines of tanks or working under the bellies of Hueys and Chinooks. They knocked on our door in the amber green of shirts and trousers burned by the hot steam of the ironing press. They stepped out of Jeeps in the emerald green of dress uniforms worn for traveling or staying in the garrison. Sometimes they approached our bungalow with smiles, but most often with stern looks and tired eyes.

  They were the men in the green uniforms, the men who threw us gum, patted our shoulders, and brought us toys. But when they came to see our mother, they slipped off their black boots and their pressed uniforms. When they left, their uniforms were creased and crumpled. Sometimes Sa and I spied on Mother and her clients through the cracks of the bamboo partition. As the clients undressed, we saw them change from green to the color of the chameleons that we caught on rocks as they changed from emerald to stone.

  Mother ventured out and left us to ourselves. Sa and I emerged from the bungalow excited about the flooding and the wreckage. We played in the retreating waters of the flooded dumps. We surfed on broken doors floating in the knee-deep waters. We forgot about our fathers, forgot about America until we came back home and saw a client leaving our bungalow. I liked the typhoons because my mother stayed home with us and because the clients were absent. Without them, it was just the three of us waiting out the storms.

  One day soon after the storms, when the cement blocks of our bungalow walls were still wet, Sa and I walked to the neighbor’s rain gutters and showered under the run-off. With our clothes wet, our hair matted down, and our rubber sandals squeaking, we started down the alley towards home. The tomato vines had been stripped of their leaves, and all the fruit was crushed and scattered across the muddy ground. The bushes of chili peppers and grapefruit trees were usually shaded. Now, with the broad leaves of the banana trees ripped to shreds, they sat exposed to the hot sun.

  As we approached the patio, we saw that a dark-haired soldier was stretched out in our hammock. His field cap covered his face. One arm rested on his stomach and the other hung off the side of the hammock. The fingers of his hand gripped the blue plastic straps of a pair of roller skates. The metal skates shone in the
sun. I looked at Sa, and I knew that we wondered the same thing: maybe this soldier was one of our fathers. As we stepped closer, our sandals squeaked. We stood beside the hammock and looked down at the dark-haired soldier. He seemed to be asleep. The bungalow door was open. I knew Mother was inside and would come out at any moment. The soldier had a dark tan and curly black hair. Suddenly, he kicked up his feet, sat up, and grabbed Sa in one swift movement. He smiled and laughed—his laughter infectious. He picked up the roller skates and pointed toward Sa’s bare feet. Smiling, Sa took off his sandals, and the soldier strapped the skates on for him. Then he gripped Sa’s arms and pushed him backward on the patio cement. I laughed. The soldier let him go. Sa stood stiffly with his arms out and his knees locked straight, then kicked his legs and rolled until he tumbled onto the cement.

  Mother came out of the bungalow and handed the soldier a glass of lemonade. With ice in it, the glass was sweating in the heat of the afternoon. Mother must have gotten the ice from the market. It was rare that she bought blocks of ice, which had been wrapped in burlap bags and stored in sawdust. But occasionally she bought it when she crushed green tea leaves and made iced tea, and among her utensils was an awl that she used for chipping it. I looked at the dark-haired soldier and at the chips floating in the glass. I thought he was one of our fathers because he was special enough to get ice in his glass.

  “Can I have some ice?” I asked. I knew there was a whole block somewhere in the bungalow.

  “Me too!” said Sa, who slipped on the roller skates and nearly fell face first on the cement patio.

  Mother went into the bungalow. We heard her chipping the block, heard each strike of the awl. The dark-haired soldier pushed Sa around some more. He rolled back and forth on the patio and bounced from wall to wall.

 

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