by David Bergen
Tomas shook his head. “You won’t do that. Not because you’re incapable. I can see what kind of man you are. I have known men like you, and normally they frighten me, but you, Charles Boatman, won’t do such a thing. You love your daughter too much.”
Charles looked around at the sculptures and the drawings and paintings. He said, “I bet you figure you’re a pretty good artist. That this is real art. Big art.” He swung his arm out at the space and said, “I figure you love this work.” Then he said that it was dangerous to love something too much. Especially something inanimate. He walked over to a sculpture of stainless steel. It was a man, ten feet tall. Testicles of ball bearings and a penis of solid steel, turned slightly, with a circumcised tip of hammered copper. Charles had milled the metal for the piece and delivered it three weeks earlier. He touched the ball bearings and said, “I could castrate this fellow for you.”
He looked over at Tomas, who was no longer smiling.
Charles patted the hollow thigh of the sculpture. “If you hurt her, I’ll kill you,” he said. Then he turned and walked to the door and stepped outside and walked back up to his truck. Sat in it and thought about Tomas and thought about Del. His hands were shaking. He started the truck and drove home and found Ada at the kitchen table. She’d done the dishes and made herself toast and eggs. She asked if he wanted some, and then, not waiting for an answer, she got up and turned on the element. Fried him eggs and laid them out on a plate with buttered toast.
Charles ate and watched Ada watching him. Finally, he said, “You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you? Run off with a man twice your age?”
“She hasn’t run off, Dad.”
“She will. I can see it.” He drank his coffee, put the mug down, and said, “I want to burn the man’s shop down. But like you said, that would be like torching my own income, seeing as I supply him with all his metal. And so, here I sit, believing that money is more important than my younger daughter.”
“It’s not.”
“No?” Charles loved Ada’s confidence, the fact that she didn’t trust the obvious. Whereas Del was enthusiastic and gullible, Ada was skeptical. She would suffer for it. He didn’t tell her that, but he could see that hers would not be a naïve existence. He said, “The man’s too damn smug.” Then he sighed and asked Ada about Claire Toupin. What did she think of her?
Ada made a face. Said that it was unfair to ask, because obviously he liked her and it didn’t matter what Ada thought.
“Oh, it matters. It might not change anything, but it matters.”
“She’s plastic,” Ada said.
Charles lifted an eyebrow and said, “Well.”
“At least she looks that way. And even when she talks, everything’s so exciting. She’s too happy. She doesn’t seem very”—Ada moved a hand, looking for the word—“very aware.”
“She’s good for me.”
“I know.”
“I could use some happiness.”
“I’m glad for you, Dad. Really.” She stood and kissed his forehead. She had just showered and he smelled the shampoo and her hair was still damp. Its length fell forward and brushed his cheek and he recalled Claire’s hair falling against his chest. He wanted to hang on to this brief moment.
CHARLES DID NOTHING ABOUT TOMAS AND DEL. HE THOUGHT about it. One night, he left the house around 3 A.M. and he walked up the hill, carrying a jerry can of gas. He went directly toward Tomas’s workshop and he stood and imagined what havoc would transpire as the building went up in bright flames. There would be the fire trucks arriving too late from the valley, and the police would come and questions would be asked and of course everything would point back to Charles Boatman and, in the end, Charles couldn’t imagine leaving his children alone. He would be put in prison and Ada would have to take over the house and the responsibilities, and so, he couldn’t act. It wasn’t cowardice. He was a practical man.
He was aware of Del’s movements back and forth between the two places, but he did nothing, and it grieved him that Tomas had been right. And then, one day, Del moved in with the artist. She pulled up in Tomas’s pickup, loaded her things, and drove back up the mountain. Charles watched her, and just before she left, he said, “At least he could come down here and talk.”
“He’s scared of you, Dad,” Del said.
Charles thought about this and it didn’t surprise him. What surprised him was Del’s acceptance of this fact, as if she knew that her father was capable of some sort of madness. It was as if she had thrown up a mirror before him and he hadn’t recognized himself.
Still, after a month or so, Del brought Tomas down to the caboose for a visit. She’d made a cake and sat beside Tomas and urged him to eat. She clung to his arm and kissed his big head and put her hands against his neck and the side of his face. He was brash and full of bluster and talked about his projects and the money he was making, but he never looked Charles in the eye.
Later, Charles asked Ada, “What did he think I was going to do?”
“You’re unpredictable, Dad.”
“Ach, that’s bullshit. Anyways, Del sure seems fired up for him.”
And then, within the month, Ada moved to Vancouver. She was studying culinary arts at a local college. And then Jon moved out as well. He found a place in Abbotsford where he planned to finish high school. Only later did Charles learn that Jon had moved in with an older man, a high school history teacher, but by the time Charles heard about this, his own demons had come back and he didn’t have the wherewithal to confront Jon.
The silence defeated him. At first he had been pleased to think of living on his own again. Claire could visit without interruptions, there would be less food to buy, less cleaning, fewer troubles, not as much money needed, though it became quite clear that Ada needed her tuition fees and rent money; she had a part-time job but she was hard-pressed to pay for the apartment. So, Charles helped her out. Del and Jon seemed to need nothing, which was disconcerting.
In the mornings, as the rain drove against the windows, he considered his day and discovered that hope had previously been based on busyness. With the exodus of his children, he felt ancient and unmoored. Too much time to think. He still worked in his machine shop, and Claire slipped over some late afternoons for a quick moment in bed, but even these moments were elusive and ultimately left him more despondent than he had been before. In the end, life with Claire did not last. The expectation the children had visited upon this affair dissipated. “I am incapable of love,” Charles told Claire, and she, though she wanted to, lacked the wherewithal to convince him otherwise.
Over the years that followed, light and shade fell across his memories. A whole history arrives with absolute clarity and then disappears like the sun that comes so rarely into the valley—expectation, and then disappointment. There gradually emerges a series of images, built up over time. A ferry arrives from a distant shore. A boy in shorts makes fast the ropes. A blind man sings a song that is off-key but hints at a ballad that is familiar and haunting, some tune about love and death and mourning. The boy in shorts opens his mouth as if to speak and then becomes a body on a bier that is being carried by the blind man and Charles. A sign appears indicating a name—the Han River. Charles did not tell anybody about these images.
3
LIEUTENANT DAT WAS A SMALL MAN WHO WORKED FOR ROOM 19, a division of the Danang police force that concerned itself with foreigners and religion. Dat was the policeman to whom Ada and Jon had been directed when they first arrived in Danang and he was the man to whom they kept returning. They would meet him in his office and ask if there was any news of their father. Dat would shake his head mournfully and then ask if they needed anything, a guide perhaps, or an evening out on the town.
Jon asked about their father’s valuables. Could they have them? Dat, who had none of Mr. Thanh’s tact or efficacy in English or even kindness, shook his head and said they were being held.
“Why are they being held?” Ada asked. Dat motioned at her leg
s and said that Ada had no idea how men in Vietnam would view so much bare flesh. She wore shorts and her legs were long. He said that she should wear dresses, or pantaloons.
She said, “Pantaloons?”
She asked at least to see a list of their father’s valuables, and Dat shook his head and said, “No.”
“Were you aware of him?” Ada asked. “Did you see him around town?”
Dat smiled. “There are many tourists that pass through. I cannot be aware of every one.”
“But you were aware of him missing. That’s why you took his things.”
“The hotel contacted me about a foreigner who had not returned to his room for a week. I made some inquiries, determined that this man, your father, was missing, and so I took his personal belongings. They are part of the investigation. Until we know what happened, we must keep his belongings. Do you understand?”
Ada said no, she didn’t understand. She closed her eyes and bit her lip. She hated this man with his officious and oily demeanor, who seemed more interested in telling her how to dress than in looking for a missing foreigner. On this day she had come alone to see Dat because Jon was tired of the nonsense that went on at Room 19. “It’s not even a real room,” he said. “And this Dat isn’t a real policeman. He just smiles at us. I refuse to be humiliated.”
And so Ada sat on a wooden chair before a wooden desk that held a single object, a letter opener with a black handle. Dat leaned back and studied her. He asked where her brother was, wasn’t he concerned for her safety?
“Was there a letter?” Ada said. “Written to us, or to someone else?”
“No letter.” Dat offered his empty palms.
“And so you’re still looking for my father? You’re going out and asking people and sending out information and talking to other policemen from other cities?”
“Of course, Miss Ada. Every day.” He lifted a hand as if asking for silence and then said, “He had a lover.”
“What do you mean? A Vietnamese woman?”
“American.”
Ada laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“It does not matter what you think. It matters what is, in fact, true.”
“Who is this woman?”
“I cannot say.”
“Because you don’t know.”
“You are sometimes rude, Miss Ada. You think that you are always right, or that I am perhaps stupid, or that I am a smaller person because I am not as rich as you. This is false. You must not assume to know me.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m worried. I’m tired. I am given no information. I just want to know what happened to my father.”
“Of course. And when we are sure about this American, we will talk to her. And then we will talk to you. These things take time. I am all alone and I have other things in my plate.” He smiled, pleased by the words he had chosen. He lit a cigarette and turned to look out the window. Ada saw that she was being dismissed.
THAT EVENING, ADA WENT OUT ALONE AND WALKED THE STREETS and then stopped for a drink at a garden café. There was a blind man sitting in a corner with a dog at his feet. The man looked to be her father’s age. He was American and he was an ex-soldier: she knew this because the man was wearing his old fatigues. He sat alone and felt for his food with his hands and occasionally bent to offer the dog a morsel. He moved his head back and forth and at one point he called out, “Young girl,” and when the waitress arrived he said he wanted another beer and more fish.
The waitress slipped away and asked Ada if she wanted another drink. Ada said no, she was fine, and as she spoke the soldier looked up and stared at the spot where Ada sat.
He called out, “American?”
She looked around the empty café. A blond girl in a bikini smiled at her from a Danish beer poster.
“No,” she said, “Canadian.”
The soldier considered this and asked, “Are you alone?” “I’m waiting for my brother,” Ada said.
A large hand rose and fell. “Join me till then.”
Ada did not want to face the man. She did not want to sit across from his stripes and his medals and have him tell her war stories, about how generals led from the rear, and how he came to be blind, and the drama of his life. Finally, he would tell her why he was here and what he was looking for and how he had not yet found it.
The man lifted his head in anticipation.
“I’m sorry,” Ada said. “I’m actually meeting my brother in a few minutes. At a different place.” She stood, put money on the table, and picked up her bag.
The soldier stuck out his hand. “George Giguerre.”
Ada looked at his hand and then walked over and shook it. “Hello,” she said.
George said he was here alone. “Except for Julie.” He pointed at his dog, whose head was down, jaw pressed against the floor.
“Pretty dog,” Ada said.
“That’s what I’m told. Tourist?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Thought so. You’re about twenty-two.”
“Twenty-eight.”
A nod and an angling of the head. The thick hand came back out. “Nice to meet you.”
Ada shook his hand again and pulled away. She stood outside the café, her hands in fists, breathing quickly. The blind man’s desperation and his uniform and his soft hand, all of this had dismayed her. She imagined her own father sitting in a bar in some other place, perhaps Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, nostalgically telling strangers about his history. She lit a cigarette.
The boy, Yen, appeared at her side and said, “I have a bird for you.” He held up a small bamboo cage. “From me to you.”
Ada stepped back. “I don’t want a bird.”
“Yes, you do. It’s good fortune. And besides, the bird is an orphan and needs an owner. Please. It would make me very happy.”
Ada put out her cigarette and began to walk away, following the path along the river.
Yen caught up to her and said, “Just yesterday I saw you at Christy’s. With your brother, playing pool. I said to myself, Yen, Ada is unhappy. What would make her happy? And I thought of a bird. So, I bought him for you and he lives with me at Mr. Minh’s but Minh doesn’t like birds so you must take him. I give him to you, with levity.”
“Who is this Mr. Minh?”
“My uncle. He works at the Chess Hotel. He is an underchef and I know you are interested because you are a chef as well. So was Bac Ho, Ho Chi Minh. It’s perfect, you see. Uncle Ho, Uncle Minh, and Miss Ada. All of you making food. That makes me feel full of fortune. I do not think, Miss Ada, that this was chance. It was planned long ago, our meeting.”
Ada kept walking. She did not argue with Yen.
He said that he wanted her to meet Minh.
She said, “No, I’m tired.”
“He thinks maybe that he met your father. Or saw him.”
Ada stopped walking. “What do you mean? Where?”
“He is not sure. He thinks maybe he saw your father one day in the restaurant. I had a photograph of your father that I procured from a shop owner, one of the shop owners you talked to, and I showed that photograph to my uncle. He recognized something, perhaps the shirt, or the hair. Of course, he might be wrong. This happens.”
Ada, alarmed, said that Yen had no business following her or taking her father’s photograph to show to some uncle of his. She said that she would like that photo back. She began to turn away but Yen shook his head vigorously and said that he meant no harm. No harm at all. “Surely you must want to see what Uncle Minh has to say.”
He beckoned and set off at a quick walk. She followed at a distance. He did not speak as he guided her, birdcage swinging from his hand, through the streets to the rear entrance of the Chess Hotel.
“Come,” he said, “I will introduce you to Minh.” He set the birdcage down by the door. They went down a hallway, past a bathroom with a squat toilet and beyond that a storage area with dry goods and pots and pans. The kitchen was small: a five-foot grill an
d three gas elements, a fridge and freezer. Yen called Minh’s name. A man appeared; he was not more than twenty-five, maybe younger. He was shirtless, and Ada was aware of his smooth chest and dark nipples. She looked away and then at his face. He shook her hand, said her name, and drew out the last vowel into an expression of surprise.
“He wants to make you onion soup,” Yen said.
Ada said she wasn’t hungry. “When did he see my father?”
Yen spoke to Minh, who folded his arms and said something back, then smiled at Ada.
“How about salad?”
“No, no, thank you.”
Minh left and returned with a glazed pastry that had half a peach at its center. He put it in a box and handed it to Ada.
She said, “My father, you saw my father.”
Yen said, “Minh didn’t make it. Soon, one day, he will know how to make peach pastry. But, not yet.” His voice got softer and he went up on tiptoes and said, “He saw your father, or a man that looked like your father, one afternoon in the restaurant of the Chess Hotel. He was eating peach pastry, just like the one you hold in your hands, with a beautiful woman. This is what Minh knows. And I know the rest.”
He paused, licked his lips, looked up into Ada’s face, and said, “She is American. She is Elaine Gouds and she lives here in Danang with her husband, Jack, and they have two children. This is what I know.”
“Can I meet her? This woman?”
Yen shrugged. He said that he did not have that kind of power. He was not a magician.
“You know where she lives, don’t you?”
Yen said he did.
“Take me there.”
Yen waved a hand. “Not tonight, Miss Ada. It is too late. Tomorrow.”
Ada walked outside and stood in a light drizzle. An umbrella snapped open and appeared above her head.
“Please,” she said.
“That man you met in the café,” Yen said. “George. I knew him. For two days I was his guide, fed his dog fresh bones, took him to Hoi An, made sure he was safe. And then one day he called me a name and hit me with his cane. See?” Yen raised his arm and showed Ada the welt just above his elbow.