by Dao Strom
“Another one bites the dust,” he said.
“You had insurance on this one, didn’t you?” She was equally unfazed, had been through it with him before.
He thought of something then. “My Ruger. Should I tell them? It was under the seat. It cost me a lot. I want it covered.”
“Say it was in the trunk. Say you were on your way back from the shooting range. Lie.” Then, with one of her bold, presuming smiles: “Say you had a stereo in there, too. I could use a new one.”
But it was not purely the loss of things that bothered him, was it? he thought later that night, after the police report had been filed, after Valerie had pumped herself to exhaustion atop him and then fallen asleep with arms and legs flung across more than half of the bed. It was her bed anyway, and he was indifferent to its comfort; he hoped he would leave it to her entirely soon enough, for good. Her dyed blond hair fell like a mop over her face, her brown roots showing like some grave aspect (he frankly didn’t want to know) beneath her brassy personality. He glanced at the bedside clock and recalled the scenery from the movie and the title of the book. His thoughts had been carried away with the movie, he remembered, and maybe the sight of that book had been meant to pull him back, then, into the situation at hand. Maybe it had been meant to tell him A World of Asia existed not so much on the cover or even in the contents of that textbook—or that movie—as it did in what was beyond the reflection in the glass, and notably that was the parking lot, the absence of his own car, which he could not see for all the reflections upon the windows. It was unnerving to him, the sense that one may not always be looking at what one thinks one is looking at. It was also unnerving that one could not leave one’s vehicle unguarded for even ninety minutes, without the possibility of returning to its absence and the consequences that entailed. He’d been told he was too emotional about his cars. But he couldn’t help it. It flooded him with dread to lose a car. He wanted it back. He wanted the things inside of it back, too, intact. Maybe he was “materialistic” (his college-sister’s word), but so what, he thought, so I am.
The truth was he had been driving around for months with the gun under his seat, within easy reach, just in case. Carjackings, whatever. He kept the safety on, but it was loaded and not in its case, as the law required. Some nights he had even driven with it lying on his lap, or tucked under his leg. He was uneasy enough about this to realize that he shouldn’t be doing it, that he was crossing a boundary. But he had succumbed to the security of it, a gun under the seat, as a person might succumb to candy or pornographic movies; juvenile, guilty pleasures that did not actually eradicate lust, or fear.
In the morning they ate breakfast in front of the television on Valerie’s kitchen counter. She would drive him to work, she had said.
A commercial jingle for dog food came on, and she got up to dance across the kitchen floor with the dogs, the two little brown mutts. She held them upright by pulling on their front paws, and they followed her lead with stiff, earnest focus. They had short, peppery-brown fur and pert, compact bodies, but around their muzzles the fur was long and straggly, making their faces look like those of bearded old men. She wore a pair of Thien’s boxer shorts and a tank top. Her breasts looked large and loose beneath the thin fabric. He had thought before that her body was nicer-looking than her face.
Sometimes a contentedness with her descended upon him—and he felt as abashedly guilty about this as he did about the gun under his seat. It made him angry.
“I’m going to be late,” he said.
“Is it my fault you wouldn’t get your skinny butt out of bed?” she returned, almost gaily.
“You aren’t even dressed yet.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, like a child, he thought. She twirled one of the dogs, the dog’s hind paws taking a dozen tiny, pained steps to make one tight circle over the floor.
Digging for some morsel of harmless—still, he wished to toe the line of sensitivity—malevolence, finally Thien found it: “What dumb-ass dogs.”
He worked quietly that day, taking the usual number of breaks to smoke his cigarettes, half listening to the usual songs on the radio, half thankful when every now and again the few he liked alleviated the monotonous sounds of revving engines and rolling wheels and slamming hoods, the long whining rise and sighing descent of the motorized jack. How many times a day did he reach under the hood of a car with his fingers, find its trigger and then lift, to be met by the sight of another vehicle’s gaping innards, asking for interpretation? Some days dragged more than others. He could do much of this work without thinking and so his mind wandered. It followed the good-looking businesswoman with the Miata, pacing in her tight skirt in the waiting room while talking on her cell phone; it followed her as she flipped her buoyant hair while walking to the restroom around the side of the garage and as she delicately stepped back out; it probed her clothing for chance glimpses of the skin beneath; it followed her later as she drove away with her top down, sunglasses on.
At his lunch break he made a phone call to the police department, gave his license plate number, waited. He was told: no news. “Usually they turn up in forty-eight hours or so if they turn up at all,” the officer had told him the previous night.
It had been eighteen hours. He imagined the joy-riders still whizzing about; they could’ve been to Mexico and back by now.
“Bummer about your wheels, man,” said a co-worker named Jerry, who was one of the younger boys, maybe twenty, and the only white employee at this company (the rest were Mexican or Asian). Jerry was sociable, would chat up customers, laugh loudly at dumb jokes, snap his oil rag at the others when he should’ve been working. Harmless. Still, Thien didn’t like him.
In fact, the only co-worker Thien did like enough to call a friend was Ramone, whom everyone called simply Mone. Mone claimed his heritage was a mixture of Mexican-Indian, American-Indian (or “Native American,” though he preferred the former term because of its more to-the-pointness, he said), German, and Irish; he was also a Catholic. He was twenty-nine, slightly older than Thien, lean and of medium height with skin the same glowing color and texture as burnished pale oak wood; his eyes were dark green, his long hair a unique shade of brown. Women stared at him, Thien had noticed, though sometimes almost with fear, with curious mistrust. Mone spent much of his spare time on his back underneath or bent over the gaping mouth of his own 1970 Datsun 240-Z, one of the most coveted of the Datsun Z car series, rarer and sportier and more expensive to restore than the 510. Mone kept his car locked in his mother’s garage and drove it only on rare occasions.
Mone lived with his mother, who spoke only Spanish fluently. He paid her bills, carried in her groceries, ran errands to pick up her prescriptions, took her cats to the vet, et cetera. At times Thien became annoyed by Mone’s dutifulness, these activities, their meandering and stalling effects on their friendship; he never waited for Mone to go somewhere with him, he would just leave. And Mone was always unperturbed—by Thien’s impatience as well as by the undependable clock of his own life. So the two remained friends. Often what they shared were silences: watching a sports event on the couch, with Mone’s mother moving about the kitchen in the background; working on one or the other’s car while listening to the radio; going to a movie. Mone did not date (Thien suspected it had to do with his mother) and they rarely talked about girls, or any personal facts of their lives. Maybe a thought dropped here and there—but neither was the kind to question further, or to talk willingly about such matters unless prodded.
Mone carried a hunting knife strapped to his shin, which on occasion he had unsheathed for Thien’s sake. “Could skin a baby with this edge,” he had said once, but these sounded like words he had heard someone else say and was repeating.
Mone was the one who had let Thien in on the secret—the option—of driving with a gun under the seat. And Mone had been serious, entirely sincere in his paranoia. “You never know, man, when some crazy is gonna pop up in your window. I’ll shoot through
the glass if I have to, I’ll be all cut up by glass if I have to, if it means protecting my own life. Shit, yeah.”
Thien had seen the drama in this, at first, and then the inkling, the disturbing seed, of its possibility. He began to keep his gun loaded in the house, then in the car. One of his cousins was robbed at a traffic light as early as seven p.m. in a decent neighborhood, and you could blame it on the fact of his BMW, sure, but still. Sometimes when Thien thought about the world he saw a grid, an immense terrifying grid of objects—like city lights, computer chip boards—viewed from a long distance. The sight made him agoraphobic. There were too many available turns to take; too many people; it was impossible even to imagine the depths of abnormality into which one human being might sink, unnoticed. You just never could be sure.
In the break room Mone nodded to Thien. “Check this out,” he said. He was watching the television that was mounted high in one corner of the room, on the wall. “Some guy just went berserk and took a video store clerk hostage in Mira Loma. Look. The TV crew got hooked up to the video store’s security cameras somehow. This is live footage, man. They already caught him, though. Trying to run out the back door.”
“No one got shot or anything, though,” said Jimmy Liu, who was also in the break room, sitting back on the sagging car seat they used for a couch.
“What kind of gun did he use?” asked Thien.
“They didn’t say,” answered Jimmy Liu.
“A nine-millimeter Ruger P-89,” said Mone eagerly, because he knew this was exactly what Thien had lost.
“Yeah, right,” said Thien. He patted his pockets for his cigarettes, headed outside to smoke.
On the blacktop after he had finished smoking, he stubbed his cigarette under his shoe, turned, and walked toward the restroom around the side of the garage. It had never been clean here, next to the Dumpster and fence that separated the service station from the apartment complex next door—but he was used to it. The door, when he tried it, was locked. He wandered back to the corner, debating his need to wait, when he heard the door open. A man had opened the door a few inches, to peek out, it seemed. Thien caught his eye, and the man pulled the door shut again. But this glimpse of him stayed in Thien’s head: a long-faced man, light brown skin, short, frizzy black hair, apathetic expression, some scruff along his jaw and above his lips, long, thin fingers lying on the doorknob. Thien decided to walk away; he could use the restroom later. But then the man exited, striding swiftly past Thien without a glance, and climbed into a pickup truck (red, Toyota Tacoma, V-6, probably an ’88) parked among the other cars in the lot; he pulled out and drove off. Thien had an unclean, a sickly feeling, yes, but told himself it was silly and would be inappropriately discriminating not to use the restroom after this man just because of, what? The look of him, his skin color? Thien told himself: the man was tall, a little skinny; he was dressed in normal, clean clothes. He drove away in a decent vehicle.
When Thien went to pull open the door, he was surprised to find the restroom still occupied. A woman. Her appearance was ruffled, her expression surprised and apologetic. She was gathering what appeared to be Band-Aids from the floor and stuffing them hurriedly into her plastic bag—a bag that seemed to contain other plastic bags. She was not totally despondent-looking, but he assumed she was a homeless person. She wore jeans and dirty, thin-soled sneakers and several layers of big flannel shirts that didn’t match. Her blond hair was uncombed. In her thirties, he thought. She was wiping her mouth with a paper towel, and her eyes looked a little raw at the corners. Spotting Thien, she rose from the floor with the courtesy of a drunken person trying to conceal her drunkenness with an overt attempt at manners. “Oh, excuse me,” she said and, brightly, “There you go, now,” as she ducked out the door. He was holding the door open for her. He wished that if he let it go, it would swing shut fast enough to hit her—a complicated anger had risen inside him—but it was a heavy door, a slow one, on a hydraulic hinge. He noticed the crumpled paper towels on the floor. He felt helpless, foolish, his imagination racing. He used the restroom nevertheless.
Later that afternoon, when he called the police again about his car, it was this man’s face he pictured looking furtively out from behind the wheel, although he was aware this was an unfounded suspicion.
Thien had told his sisters about the deer’s leg twirling up into the sky like a baton over the fence not to scare them as much as to shield them: he’d understood (if only instinctively rather than consciously) that there was a need for embellishment in such situations, that if you sufficiently dramatized an event to a point of near impossibility, you could be saved. You could be saved from a more private and difficult processing of the event.
He had created a grotesque cartoon image of the deer’s leg spinning upward like a fire baton, except that blood instead of flames made colorful arcs in the air. He had told them how the blood had wheeled everywhere; it was like a sprinkler, like rain. He had told them this with a tone of pleasure, the kind of tone he knew his little sisters would respond to with “nuh-unh’s.” Neither could remember seeing any blood. You’re gross, they said, and Eew, and so the fact of gore had been attributed to him, and the actual incident pretty much forgotten. And Thien was fine with this. He was, in fact, relieved.
Maybe one day he would tell them more, he thought.
Hus had talked in theory about the deer. Deer were astounding jumpers, he said. This deer must’ve been sick, weak already, if unable to make that easy jump. Or he said: the fence was of a poor design. The crosswires stuck out too far from the fence line, and it was easy for animals to get caught; the Garretts should’ve known better when they built the fence. Then Hus went further. Where was the deer now? he speculated. Probably it had died, shunned by the other deer because of the human scent on it and left to fend off coyotes and mountain lions and wild strays. The accusation burned in Thien’s mind.
And Hus made other accusations (Thien had begun to notice them around this time, when he was fifteen years old) about people in general. Fallibility was a fault that couldn’t be corrected, his comments had made it seem to Thien, the tendency toward mistake or failure or sloth—it was like ugliness. Unfortunate but undeniable; probably a result of unfit genetics. Just as Hus praised certain breeds of dogs for having good temperament and looks and acumen in their ancestry (the Rottweiler, the German shepherd, the Newfoundland, the Saint Bernard, the Great Pyrenees, and Bernese mountain dogs, as well as any mixture of two or more commendable breeds, because Hus was also wont, on occasion, to praise the surprise strengths of an anomaly), so had he constructed similar theories regarding geographies—races—of people.
You could view the world as you viewed the body, Hus seemed to think, when it came down to it: nether and upper regions, hither and yonder. What went on below was cruder, base, potentially and problematically violent, irrational; what went on above was loftier, better intentioned, better planned, cerebral. Of the continental states, for instance, Hus despised Texas most of all, though he’d flown over it, and maybe stopped in it once. Nevertheless he was certain it was a wasteland of bad taste, backward manners, crass Americanism, inbreeding—he had met Texans in the U.S. Army (had shared a bunkhouse with a boy from Lubbock who was the first to expose Hus to the most unbelievably idiotic kind of music he had heard in his life, a wheedling, grating kind of music that was, it had seemed to Hus, especially aimed to promote mediocrity and praise only the virtues of ignorance and self-satisfaction. Hus had also been appalled by his roommate’s speech, how it seemed the boy spoke through a mouthful of rocks that contorted his face from the inside with each word). Hus had glimpsed the poor conditions of the South while in boot camp in Alabama (ramshackle wooden houses, haggard-looking women on sunken porches, junk in the front yards, poorly dressed kids, derelict automobiles yawning open alongside potholed roads), though he claimed one could’ve surmised it all just as well from the topography, the weather reports, the bird’s-eye view out the airplane window. Because for Hus it was mo
untains and seas that held the most distinction—striking, noble vistas and dramatic elevations and expanses sure to create people of respectable composure and unflinching vision. (The hush and grandeur and clear air of northern regions versus the squalor and heat and density and small-animalia of southern regions; civilized, advanced methods of warfare versus cowardly, subversive guerrilla techniques.) For Hus, it seemed a crucial, personal matter to be able to explain the world so categorically. And it put him at ease, made him amiable, actually, if Thien listened and agreed.
Still, Hus’s attitude got under Thien’s skin. It had not been lost on him that he and his mother (and April) came from that lower category, that southward one. And Hus’s criticisms were inconsistent. He had cursed idleness yet called their mother “ruthless” when she buried herself in a book or got lost in her notebooks. He poked fun at her for being sedentary and inept at housework, yet spoke negatively of more apparently domestic mothers in the neighborhood, calling them, with disdain, “domineering women.” He didn’t allow Thien’s sisters to play dress-up in certain clothes he deemed provocative, yet had bought Thien the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar each year for Christmas after his fourteenth birthday.
Thien had not always known how to regard his mother while she was alive. The way she dressed in secondhand clothes from the 1970s; her embarrassing habit of asking people questions to which they’d already given answers, and, especially, the way she looked whenever she attempted something new—she was small, determined, vulnerable but utterly unselfconscious. When she decided to take up power-walking as other women in the area were doing, Thien became aware of smirks on the faces of boys he knew passing by on their motorbikes. There was his mother in a white sweatband, her childish padded body in unseemly white sweatpants. The worst part was that Hus cringed, too, discreetly (but Thien saw it), and in public had begun to call her “Tran” in the casual way other parents called each other by their first names, although she still addressed him as “Daddy.” Sometimes Thien could find a comforting humor in the odd details he attributed to his mother (her bell-bottom pants, her taste for what seemed to Thien “old-lady” purses, her candor when she asked him to explain certain slang phrases or figures of speech), but in the next moment these things could fill him with a sudden, terrible humiliation.