The Handyman

by Bentley Little

  “We’re both here,” Owen announced. “Conference call.”

  They must have found something.

  “Did some more research,” Evan confirmed.

  “And?”

  “We have access to a program that’s kind of a spreadsheet deal—”

  “An algorithm,” Owen offered.

  “We don’t know what the hell it is,” Evan admitted, “but it sorts and analyzes data about hauntings and sightings and supernatural events. We use it all the time for Ghost Pursuers. I don’t know who came up with it—some university’s parapsychology department, probably—but it’s kind of an industry standard. Which means that not just us but researchers from all over are putting in information about their findings for others to see.”

  “And?” I repeated.

  “And our theory about Frank seems to be more right than we thought. Like we told you, there’s been an increase in psychic activity wherever he’s hung out his shingle. But it’s bigger than that. Because it’s not just in those places. His movements have been pretty much confined to the western half of the United States, but in that exact same time period, there’s been an increase in activity all over the country.”

  “The correlation’s there,” Owen said.

  “Think of an open faucet, spilling out all over, water spreading far away from the original source.”

  I was skeptical. “And you attribute it to Frank?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “And it’s still spreading. That’s why we have our show, why there are all those haunting shows out there. There’s a lot going on. We ran everything by Kayley Samhoe, one of the psychics we use on the program, to see if she had some ideas. She had an interesting theory. She also agreed with us that it’d make a great show, just following this thread, and I guarantee you that if Scott doesn’t want to do it for Ghost Pursuers, we can probably get something going with Travel or NatGeo. I mean, this is solid stuff—”

  “But…” Owen prompted.

  “Oh, yeah. Well, Kayley came up with the idea that all this activity might be leading up to something.” He couldn’t help himself. “Which would also make a great show. I mean, the arc’s already built in…”

  “Kayley’s theory,” Owen interrupted, “is that these events aren’t just becoming more frequent, they’re getting bigger. And, eventually, there’s going to be…an explosion.”

  “Something major.”

  “Major.”

  I shook my head, though they couldn’t see it. “That’d make a good movie, but I can’t see some apocalyptic event triggered by Frank’s house repairs. The whole idea’s ridiculous.”

  “But what if it’s true?”

  “That’s just stupid.”

  “But what if it’s true?”

  “It can’t be.”

  “But what if it is?”

  What if it was?

  I didn’t want to believe it. I told myself I couldn’t believe it.

  But I could. I thought of that house the size of a town, thought about all of the people whose lives had been destroyed, remembered my six minutes that had been six days.

  “Did you discover anything else?” I asked.

  I could hear the grin in Evan’s voice. “Oh, indeed we did.”

  In a truly heroic bit of sleuthing, they’d managed to track down Dang Nguyen, a former South Vietnamese soldier who had known Frank during the war. Old and frail, he now lived in a rest home in the Little Saigon area of Westminster, right here in Orange County.

  “A rest home?” I said dubiously.

  “His grandson said he has health problems, but his mind’s sharp. He remembers Frank and he’s willing to talk to us.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, if you can make it.”

  “Give me a time. I’ll be there.”

  “Want to meet at your office and carpool, so we can discuss things on the way?”

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  They texted me later with the name and address of the rest home in which the ex-soldier was living, and the time we were to meet, which was ten-thirty.

  Evan and Owen had said that the old man’s English was sketchy, and I figured he could express himself better and go into greater detail if he spoke in his native tongue, so I decided to invite May along as a translator. She had been moody lately, ever since her chatty unlicensed contractor—

  Frank Walters

  —had brought up bad memories about Vietnam. I’d left her alone, hadn’t pressed, but I thought perhaps, in addition to translating, she might open up a little if we were all in a car discussing Frank. She knew only that the guy who’d torn down her storage shed was an insensitive jerk. It was going to be a real eye opener to find out Frank’s history, and even if she didn’t believe it all—or believe it at all—she still might tell me something I could use.

  Teri, when I told her about it later, thought it was a mistake to get May involved. She was already involved, I reminded her. She’d been targeted by Frank.

  I wanted to find out why.

  We were supposed to meet at the real estate office at nine, but Evan and Owen were late. They called from the middle of a traffic jam on the Santa Ana Freeway in Norwalk, telling me that as soon as they got past construction in the right lane some two miles ahead, it would be clear sailing. Mike, Jim and May were already at their desks and working, and though I wanted to pull May aside and give her some background on Frank, I didn’t want to do it in front of my other agents. I wasn’t even sure how to bring up what had happened without making myself sound like a total lunatic. So I let her work, and figured she could get up to speed in the car on the way over.

  It was nearly ten by the time Evan and Owen pulled up in front of the office. I told Mike and Jim to hold down the fort for a few hours as May and I went outside to meet them. The only thing May knew was that I needed her to help translate for an ex-South Vietnamese soldier, but I explained to her on the sidewalk that we were questioning the man about a person named Frank, who I believed was responsible for my brother’s death.

  She looked curiously and suspiciously at me when I mentioned Frank’s name.

  “I’ll explain in the car,” I said.

  Evan and Owen had arrived in a new black SUV. It was better than either of my crappy vehicles or May’s Volvo, and she and I got into the backseat. I introduced everyone, and when I told May that Evan and Owen worked on Ghost Pursuers, she said, “Van and I watch that show!”

  The two writers were as voluble as usual—well, Evan was—and after basking in May’s praise, they began laying out what they’d learned about Dang Nguyen. Apparently, he was the one who had introduced Frank to the primitive local beliefs that had led him to seek out banned practitioners of this indigenous faith. “Like we said before, one of the main tenets? Talking to the dead.”

  As I’d hoped, May spoke up and asked what this had to do with my brother’s death, and that gave me the opening I needed. I decided to start from the beginning. “You’re not going to believe this,” I prefaced my explanation.

  “But it’s true,” Evan butted in.

  “All of it,” Owen seconded. “We were at those Arizona houses. We experienced it.”

  As we drove, I told her an abbreviated version of events, sticking to the highlights. She didn’t ask questions, merely listened, and when I was done, she said, “And you think this is my contractor.” It wasn’t a question.

  I nodded, glad she’d made the connection on her own.

  May was silent for a moment, and I wasn’t sure whether she was going to tell us we were all crazy and demand to be driven back to the office, or admit that she, too, had had some sort of supernatural experience involving Frank. Her reaction was somewhere in the middle, but she didn’t reject the premise entirely, and for a civilian that was goo
d enough.

  Traveling south on Brookhurst, we passed through an area of Middle Eastern shops and restaurants, then block after block of lower middle class homes. Houses gave way to businesses again, and as we passed from Anaheim into Garden Grove and then into Westminster, the ethnicity of the communities gradually changed. We passed an old Taco Bell that had been converted into a banh mi shop, a Burger King that had become a restaurant called Saigon Noodle House, strip mall after strip mall whose signs were in Vietnamese. I remembered, a decade or so back, when California had gone through one of its periodic bouts of immigrant bashing, that there’d been a push to have all business signs in the state be in English. I’d been approached by a right wing group outside the post office to sign a petition that would put such a measure on the ballot. “It’s a free country,” I told the signature gatherers. “The government shouldn’t be telling private businesses what they can put on their own signs.”

  “This is America,” one of them responded. “You’re supposed to speak English.”

  “This is America. And the government can’t dictate what language I can or cannot speak. I can talk in any damn language I want. It’s a free country,” I repeated.

  I didn’t sign the petition.

  We turned onto Bolsa, into the heart of Little Saigon.

  “We should’ve brought cameras with us,” Owen said. “Gotten all this on film.”

  “You’re right,” Evan agreed. “Damn!”

  “We could go back—”

  “We’re not going back,” I told them.

  “Is your phone charged up? We can use it to record the interview.”

  “Close enough for rock and roll,” Owen said.

  The rest home was even more depressing than those places usually were. Two stories of ugly gray, it was a stucco cracker box, its entrance flush with the uneven sidewalk, with no sign of a lawn. The few windows facing the street had wrought iron bars over them, although whether that was to keep criminals out or keep residents in was impossible to tell. We parked in a narrow lot on the side of the building next to a white cargo van with the name of the rest home written on the side in faded brown letters.

  Dang Nguyen was a small wrinkled man living in a narrow room barely big enough to accommodate his bed, a dresser and a television. There was no way the four of us could fit inside or even stand in the doorway, so an attendant helped him walk down the short hall to a dark empty dining room barely bigger than the living room in my house. There were three round tables, each ringed with six chairs, and we sat down at the closest one, the attendant turning the light on for us before leaving.

  Evan and I looked at each other to determine who would ask the first question, while Owen turned on his phone to record the encounter. Evan nodded at me, throwing the ball in my court, and I addressed the old man, speaking loudly and slowly. “Mr. Nguyen? My name’s Daniel. I understand that you knew Frank Watkins? Back in Vietnam?”

  He nodded. “We meet in Duoc Song. He in army. I guide.”

  “I heard that he was interested in…” I looked at May. “The occult,” I said.

  She translated the word for me.

  Nguyen nodded again. “That why I tell him about wandering dead.”

  “Wandering dead?”

  He said something to May in Vietnamese, and she nodded. “I’m going to interpret for him,” she explained. “It’s easier.”

  He began speaking a sentence at a time, giving her time to translate. “The dead wander if they are taken from their home. If a person is not buried or cremated in his own village, his spirit will not remain with his body. The spirit will wander, searching for home, and will be forever lost because the body has no home. There are many wandering ghosts during wartime.”

  “And Frank wanted to contact these wandering ghosts?”

  Nguyen was silent for a moment, considering how much he wanted to say.

  “We need to know,” I told him. “Frank is a bad man.”

  “Frank bad,” he agreed.

  “Very bad.”

  He sighed, resuming again in Vietnamese.

  “We believe that the dead have power,” May translated. The old man gestured toward the corner of his room, where framed black and white photos of an Asian man and woman stood between two sticks of incense in front of a red backdrop decorated with gold lettering. “We rely on the dead. We ask our ancestors to watch over us, and they remain in our lives, helping when they are able and doing whatever they can to make our days happy.”

  I saw May wipe a tear from her eye.

  “Frank,” Nguyen said, and it was jarring to hear the name because it was the only word not spoken in Vietnamese. “He did not honor his ancestors,” May translated. “He talked to the wandering ghosts of our people. He wanted to use them. For what, no one knew, but he thought he could control them and make them do what he wanted them to do.”

  The old man looked remorseful. “It was my fault,” May translated. “I introduced him to Thanh Ngo, a…” She frowned. “Hold on. I don’t know that word.”

  She and Nguyen spoke briefly in Vietnamese.

  “I guess he was like an excommunicated priest or some sort of disgraced religious leader, only for a local religion that was native to that part of Vietnam.”

  Nguyen nodded, then continued, May translating: “I took him to see Thanh Ngo, although I do not remember why. He probably paid me. I needed money in those days.

  “It was said that Thanh Ngo spoke to the dead—and the dead spoke back. He had abilities that good men did not possess and that he used for wrong purposes. Even the VC were afraid of him and left him alone. He was supposed to be over a hundred years old, and he lived in the ruins of an ancient temple, in the land where the old gods still walked.” May met my eyes and shrugged as if to distance herself from his words, to indicate she had no connection to this Vietnam. “The war was not happening there, even though it was not that far from the Americans’ camp. I brought Frank to Thanh Ngo, and he became his pupil. Frank visited Thanh Ngo whenever he could, and finally he abandoned his army. He left the Americans and lived in the temple. The last time I saw Frank, before I left Duoc Song, he was…” Nguyen shivered at the memory.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He was younger. I heard later, when I asked, that there was no more Thanh Ngo, only Frank.”

  “Do you mean he killed him?” I asked.

  Nguyen nodded, answering me in English. “I think so, yes.”

  We had more questions, a lot of them, but the old man didn’t seem to know much more than he told us, although he did provide more detail. He also grew tired fairly quickly, and, soon after, one of the rest home attendants who popped in to check on us decided that Mr. Nguyen had had enough excitement for one day, and told us we would have to leave.

  On the drive back to the office, May grew increasingly quiet, as the writers and I discussed what we’d learned. “That was great stuff,” Evan said excitedly. “‘The land where the old gods still walked?’ You can’t make that shit up.”

  “There’s a series there,” Owen said. “And not just reality. Scripted.”

  “That’s where the money is,” Evan explained.

  It seemed to be Frank’s involvement with this dead religion, and what he had learned from its banished leader that had made him what he was today.

  “Mr. Nguyen didn’t seem to know many specifics,” Evan said, “but from what we’ve learned already, it must involve sacrifices. All the bodies and bones. Pets. Children.”

  Billy.

  “I think he knew more than he let on,” Owen posited. “I mean, if he was aware of this Thanh guy and knew where to find him…” He looked over at May. “What say you?”

  “Maybe,” she said quietly.

  “This is a gold mine,” Evan said. “Exciting stuff.”

  May didn’t speak again until we were back at t
he office. “It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked, once Evan and Owen had dropped us off.

  I met her eyes. “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  The rest of the day was busy. There were walk-in clients as well as previously scheduled meetings, and I did not even have time for lunch, let alone time to discuss what had happened with May. I tried talking to her at the end of the day, but she held up a hand before I’d even gotten half a sentence out. “Tomorrow,” she told me. “I need time to…absorb.”

  “Understandable,” I said.

  I picked up Teri on my way home from work and told her about our trip to Little Saigon. She said nothing until I was finished. “What have you stumbled onto?” she wondered.

  It was a good question, and not for the first time I wished that my dad had never read Blue Highways, that we’d taken the interstate back from the trip to see my cousins in Colorado, bypassing Randall, and that we’d never met Frank and Irene. My life would be completely different today—better—and I would know nothing about any of this but would be living a blissfully ignorant existence devoid of any hint of the supernatural.

  But that was magical thinking, like praying for God to turn back time and undo events that had already happened. This was my world, and I could only deal with it as it was.

  I didn’t feel like going out to a restaurant and Teri didn’t feel like cooking, so we stopped off to pick up a pizza on the way home. There was too much to talk about, but neither of us were up to it, so we vegged out in front of the television, eating our pizza and catching up on shows we’d recorded earlier in the week.

  If I’d never encountered Frank, would I still be with Teri? I wondered. Or would I be with someone else? Would I be married by now? Would I have children?

  The rabbit hole was deep, I thought.

  For the first time in a long while, we did dishes together. Afterward, we took a shower and made love.

  Lying in bed, arms around each other, we discussed Frank.

  “So he was mentored by some kind of Vietnamese witch doctor who taught him how to communicate with the dead,” Teri said.

  “Pretty much,” I allowed.