by Dao Strom
The soldier broke them apart. His expression was startled but amused. He held them apart with a hand on each boy’s chest, his arms stretched out wide.
MECHANICS
One day a deer got caught in a fence down the road. Only three hours earlier, while he was chainsawing oak and pine trunks into big chunks of firewood, Thien had had an encounter with some other deer. It was the end of summer and a breeze was rustling through, making the tall treetops swish their branches like bellows at the sky; it surged across the long grass on the hillside like an invisible giant’s foot, pressing down upon the slope and crushing the grass for just a second, then lifting, leaving the grass to sway, dazed, upright again.
Invisible giants, lowing trees—he was growing used to being the sole witness of such entities and anomalies up in these hills where the trees and grasses were taller than any he’d seen before, and where the mountain views could set one immediately to wishing: this place with no sidewalks, no culs-de-sac, no reasonable places to ride a bicycle, no Kmart or 7-Eleven, no friends. Thien hated their new home and thought house-building a bewildering idea (why, when there were so many far nicer ones already built and available?). He missed the television programs they used to watch in their first two apartments in Sacramento, the easy glamour and humor that was, it had seemed, offering promise of what life in America should be about. He imagined it must be fun and inviting and warm behind those yellow-lit windows in the nicer Sacramento neighborhoods they used to walk through on some evenings, where the driveways were wide and garage doors open and kids rode bicycles round and round in circles in the street. In all of Thien’s earlier knowledge of America there had been nothing about chainsaws and dead trees, or the cold of these hills at night, or the discomfort of sleeping in a trailer in a tiny bunk with his nose four inches from the ceiling, or no running water or electricity, just a wheelbarrow of old plastic milk jugs to push, full and empty, up and down a gravel road. At least he was developing muscles, sometimes he thought, but this country was not much different—in terms of being easier, or at least more comfortable—than Vietnam; this was the strange, inescapable truth. At times Thien hated his mother as much as he did his new father, for what she would not take them back to—unclear as the concept of return was to him.
His ears were full of the grinding, churning buzz of the chain-saw, muffled slightly by the helmet he was wearing, when he saw out of the corner of his eye a flash of gray-brown movement, then the dogs bounding up from their resting place in the grass. His upper body jerked, too, almost dangerously, and the saw slid, the groove he was making in the log in front of him swerved, and the log rolled almost onto his feet, as he cut the chainsaw motor quickly. He pushed back his helmet, and his ears, his whole head, filled immediately with the immense rushing sound of silence, a few crackling twigs, then the sudden great rustle and crash of a heavy, swift body plunging through the pallid yellow grass and brown leaves, down the steep hillside. A family of deer (he saw them now) had passed not more than an arm’s length from where he stood, a large sleek doe followed by her two fawns, leaping effortlessly over fallen logs and brush, eyes panicked and bright yet still like stones glued into the sides of their mulish faces. The three seemed to be surrounded by a nervous, quivering rim of light, and their bodies were papery, thin-boned, thin-coated, tapering neatly at their noses, hooves, tails. They were graceful and deliberate even in their fear. The dogs pursued them with zeal; the pup’s white ears flopped comically, joyfully, while his tongue lashed about between his jaws and his barks came out in eager, unusual yelps. Jamie, the mother dog (named by Thien after the Bionic Woman), was more dutiful in her chase, barking with conviction, with a guard dog’s earnest recognition of an intrusion. Then they were gone, disappeared into the tangles of trees and grasses and viny growth that shrouded the ravine down where the hill ended. For a few seconds more Thien saw the pup’s white stump of a tail bobbing like a flag through the undergrowth, then the dogs gave up and came, noses first, out of the trees, tails wagging, tongues long, dripping, and the corners of their mouths creased into what looked like dog smiles.
Thien didn’t tell anyone else about how close the deer had passed or the slipping of the saw almost to his foot. He had felt it would be a breach of his relationship, however momentary, with the deer; and he was sure his stepfather would’ve had to make something of it, either about the boldness of the deer or his own clumsiness with the saw. Thien had learned not to talk about everything he saw, and to hide the things that might be construed as mistakes.
Now he came down the road with the wire cutters Hus had sent him back to retrieve. He saw the entangled deer, tugging and hopping frantically on three legs, its fourth leg stretched out behind it, skinny and brown and crooked like a branch, twisted in the wires of the Garrett property’s fence. It was a young deer but larger than the three young ones he’d seen earlier. Gray-faced with large black eyes and two nubs of white just beginning to protrude out of its brow. A male deer, Thien observed. Hus and Thien’s sisters were standing on the roadside a few yards from the deer.
“Don’t touch it,” Hus warned the girls, who wanted to move forward for a closer look. “If it gets the scent of humans on it, its mother and the other deer won’t go near it ever again. Smell is very important to animals.” He directed them to stand back, in the middle of the road.
Hus sent Thien forward with the wire cutters—Thien’s arms were small enough to reach through the fence—and meanwhile stood behind Thien on the bank, giving instructions. Cut there, no there, cut closer—you’re cutting his skin now, not the wire! But wire and animal leg were well entwined. Thien felt himself caught between the worry of following Hus’s instructions and the utter reality of the animal in front of him, closer even than the family that’d passed him earlier on the hill, like an omen, he thought now. The deer was panicking yet not making a sound, just pulling and pulling against the fence. The wires and his leg shook so badly that Thien could not make a clear cut. He could smell the animal, though; it smelled somewhat the same as horses, not a bad smell but also not a clean smell. Its coat was wet with sweat that made patterns like the shapes of continents on a map across its gray-brown back. Thien snipped at a piece of wire far from the leg; he was moving tentatively but wanted at least to appear to be making progress—for in truth he saw only impossibility in the redness and rawness where the wire had submerged itself in the deer’s leg, but Hus was not close enough to see that. Blood spattered on Thien’s arms and face, and he would have backed off and run were it not for his even greater fear of Hus. He knew Hus would not allow him to leave until the task was completed, and he even began to believe in the dire necessity of the task himself, with Hus’s conviction so strong and contagious behind him. It was Hus’s conviction as new father at the helm of this family that had brought them to the trailer in these scrubby-treed hills in the first place, (you are now entering gold country, said a sign along the highway at about the point where the land began to heave itself upward, like flat water stirring into waves, or like a great yellow blanket laid out and beginning, gently, to catch gusts of wind from below.) The deer lurched, stumbled, and fell away from the fence suddenly. It struggled like a creature on stilts upright onto thin legs, then bounded away, leaving half of the fourth leg still in the fence. The leg swung, then fell down into the grass with an unceremonious plop. The crosswires were bloody but still taut.
“There he goes, oh-oh, lookit that! There he goes!” Hus exclaimed. They watched as the deer cleared the far side of the fence on its three legs with no hindrance, powered now by the new strength of fear, and disappeared into the trees. “Well, I suppose a deer can survive on three legs,” remarked Hus, “I suppose he can. That is, if the coyotes don’t catch the scent of his blood first, of course.” He seemed grim but pleased—almost satisfied.
Thien didn’t say anything as he pulled his arms back out of the fence and let the wire cutters fall to his side, heavy against his legs. His sisters were standing in the road, he n
oticed, their hands over their eyes. They never saw anything, it occurred to him.
Years later this was not on his mind as he came out of the movie “Hearts of Darkness,” and his eyes had to adjust to the new level, albeit dim, of light in the movie theater lobby. The high flat ceilings were lined with neon tube lighting; shiny faux-sculpture mobiles listed idly in the breeze of the air-conditioning. The reflections of people moved eerily, transparently, across the large glass windows, blocking any view of the darkened parking lot outside. He paused to pry at an eyelid; his contacts itched. The dim outlines of angled walls and movie posters and people grew steadily brighter in his vision. What was on his mind at this moment was the movie, the mood it had put him in—detached, apprehensive—and the feeling of a wheel at the back of his mind, turning, trying to enlighten him about something just beyond the reach of his awareness. It was like a déjà vu of sorts. He could almost pinpoint it, could almost recognize what the mood reminded him of—but then he couldn’t. So he had walked with everyone else, not looking at anybody else, out of the artificial dark back into the artificial light.
It was a documentary of the making of a movie about the Vietnam War. Though it wasn’t his apparently relevant connection (the subject matter) that he felt strangely toward so much as it was an encompassing revelation about movies in general—the awesome but absurd confluence of the make-believe and the actual that happened on a set. The oldest of his younger sisters, who was eighteen, was currently in film school; she was the one who had recommended this movie. Though he thought he might’ve gone to see it anyway, regardless of her opinion. (She had developed a particular attitude lately, as if her education had made her privy to some secret knowledge. She laughed at points in movies now where there was nothing to laugh at, he had noticed.) He thought of the actors and their fireworks, their fake ammo, their massive, elaborate fake explosions, their drugs. He thought of Marlon Brando’s ugly squished face, remembered how funny it was to see Marlon Brando say candidly, “I swallowed a bug,” and how that funniness had opened into something else—weirder and bigger and sadder—the sensation Thien could not pinpoint. He thought people involved in making movies stood somehow at the edge of the world, enlightened and twisted, both, by the range of their power, their famous faces. The movie’s subtitle was “A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” and the filmmaker had been exceedingly emphatic about his own torment over the difficulties—financial, logistic, artistic—of shooting an American movie in a Third World country. He had compared the making of this movie to the experience of soldiers in Vietnam. “This is not a film about Vietnam,” he had insisted in one interview. “It is Vietnam.”
Thien tried to picture his sister amid people like that and felt cheated because he could believe she might get there—to an unlikely, highly coveted lifestyle—but had no similar vision for himself.
He had been enrolled in community college on and off over the years and worked in a garage as a mechanic, a skill that came to him with uncanny ease, had always. He understood them, machines. If he studied any piece of machinery long enough, he could figure out how it worked, how the parts had to come apart or go back together (the only problems he couldn’t figure out were the nonmechanical ones, those computer-run parts found in so many newer cars lately). This mechanical comprehension occurred in a strange region of his brain: he had only to turn off his thinking and set his hands in motion. It was the same with firing a gun—he enjoyed it and his aim was unfailingly accurate —another quiet exercise in simultaneously concentrating and letting go.
As he resumed walking after adjusting his contacts, he noticed a textbook inside the ticket-seller’s glass booth. She was obviously a student, young, self-preoccupied looking (she reminded him of his sister), also Asian. Her textbook was propped open on the counter before her, the book’s front cover reflecting in the window of the booth so that he saw its title backward: it took him a moment to unscramble the letters. A World of Asia, the book was called. In his mind the title coincided with the landscape of the movie, dark jungle and greenish mounds of mountains shaped like large reptiles’ backs at the edges of murky waters. He saw the words of the book’s title imprinted on top of these images, but again he reminded himself, this was always what it was like when he came out of a movie.
He thought of the term “sea legs.” He waited for his mind to reorient itself.
His companion, not exactly a date, was waiting for him by the door. Valerie was the only girl he had ever encountered who knew how, and was willing, to change the oil in her own car. But she was not very pretty, and in general he was confused by his feelings for her. The fact was, they spent more time together than he liked to admit, and the terms of their relationship had become ambiguous. But it was not her looks solely that were inadequate—he didn’t like to think of himself as that shallow; it was something about her entire demeanor, a certain oblivious candor she possessed. She had a horsey laugh; the tackiness of her clothes made him cringe; she did not mind talking loudly or intimately in public. Sometimes when she came to bed she removed her underpants before her bra, and Thien was revolted by her unabashedness, the utterly frightening gaucheness of her lust. She was also taller and heavier than he was, but then he was a small, slight-bodied man.
“Did that movie remind you of China?” she asked as they exited into the warm early October air.
“Vietnam,” he corrected her. She was always getting them mixed up. This was another thing about her he was wary of—her slight, though totally unmalicious, ignorance. She had never been farther outside of San Diego than San Bernadino, one hundred nine miles to the northeast where she’d grown up, and Florida, once, to visit Disney World. How could he blame her when he hardly desired to go much farther himself? He had moved from his aunt’s house in one suburb to his own house, a rental, in another suburb just a few months ago, though his aunt wouldn’t have minded if he’d stayed till he was forty, it seemed. As for the rift that had sent him out of his stepfather’s house in northern California nine years ago and brought him south to San Diego in the first place (he never actually referred to Hus as his stepfather, had done so only for a short period of time three years ago following his mother’s death, when he’d been trying in every way he could to claim himself independent of Hus’s influence—he was no longer so vindictive, had matured, he believed, past the point of blaming one’s parents for everything)—that rift had been largely glazed over, healed by time more than anything. Their animosity toward each other simply wore out. Thien now understood it’d become necessary, then, for both of them, to see him leave. He could remember, after an argument, entering the kitchen to find Hus’s bottle of ulcer pills in the middle of the counter, the cap screwed on crookedly, powder from the crushed pills visible on the countertop. Seeing that had always made Thien feel guiltily, tentatively triumphant. He had understood it as evidence of Hus’s vulnerability—a rare admission—and possibly the only unadulterated expression of emotion he would ever get from Hus. Now, though, when Thien and Hus talked on the phone occasionally, Hus became lucid, surprising. “I was quite miserable in those years,” he told Thien once. He never spoke like this when they spoke in person; selfdisclosure could be sanctioned only by phone, it seemed. Thien often didn’t know how to respond. He wanted Hus’s openness to continue but was also aware of the concentration it required on his own part. The wrong tone of voice or too probing a question could send Hus immediately back into one of his usual modes—sarcasm or bravado or speeches.
“That wasn’t really filmed in Vietnam,” Thien replied to Valerie’s question, as they crossed the parking lot. “It was filmed in the Philippines. The credits said so in the beginning.” He felt a little annoyed with her.
Then he realized his car was not where he had left it. They were where he had left it, but the car was not.
This is not happening, he thought immediately. This is not happening again. He had had three previous cars stolen in as many years. “Of course this would happen to me. Of course,” he sa
id.
“Thien, maybe it was just towed.”
Thien almost wanted to laugh. He put his hand to his head, paced the perimeter of the parking space several times as if to confirm its emptiness. There were few cars in the large parking lot. The streetlamps were tall and curved at their tops, like metal swan necks, their heads wide, buzzing bulbs of glaring, yellow light.
Thien cast his gaze around, into the distance, at the headlights of cars going by on the strip, the winking intersection lights. His was a black car, a small one. It wouldn’t be easily visible, a Honda CRX with only a few adornments. It should not have been that appealing to thieves—he had resisted his usual desire to fancily adorn the rims, the fenders, as he had done with cars in the past; he had adorned them conservatively this time. As a security measure on one of his previous cars, he had removed all the knobs, inside and out, leaving only one knob that could be easily attached and detached when he himself wanted to get in and out; whenever he left the car, he would put the handle in his pocket and carry it with him like a second key. But even that car had managed to vanish. A Datsun 510. He had belonged to a Datsun 510 car-enthusiast club but had vowed not to buy another 510 after the last one had been stolen. He had then bought a vehicle that was factory issue. He sighed, hooked his fingers in his belt loops, met Valerie’s eyes.