by Dao Strom
When he came home with the blood of the deer on his face and forearms, his mother had looked at him curiously, blankly. Arms submerged in the tiny kitchen sink, she had listened as Hus hooted, solemnly though, and again brought up the threat of the coyotes, their hunger, their wile. When it registered with her that it was the deer’s blood and not Thien’s, she had laughed, dried her arms, and gone for the camera. The whole trailer felt it when all of them came in or moved about at once; the small thin floor gave, the walls seemed to breathe, to rattle and shrug. She loved her son and saw his blood-spattered state as something to document, another small calamity in the frail course of their lives together—a strange adventure; a story to tell later. Thien didn’t always know what to make of his mother’s quick recoveries, or her cheerfulness sometimes in the face of such events. It left him feeling shot down, as if he’d just given a wrong answer in class. He wanted his mother to look with concern at him once more, to linger. But he said nothing; and keeping silent made a knot of his heart. He felt guilty and angry and distraught altogether. He would go back to the fence eventually to look for it, whatever might remain of that deer.
He was rinsing the wire cutters with water from a plastic gallon jug when his sisters came up to him later that evening. The sun had dropped below the line of the hills and everything was a fast darkening blue. The girls made their Barbie dolls tiptoe over the rocks as they spoke to each other in some kind of code.
“Hey, Harry, I think I see a waterfall ahead.”
“Gee, George, what’s a waterfall?”
“Harry, what are you asking me for? I don’t know.”
“Duh, George, what are you asking me for? I don’t know, either.”
They were manipulating their dolls’ heads and making them pause to turn their torsos and swing their permanently bent arms. Thien was familiar with this routine, though he had no idea what the reasoning behind it was; the girls just seemed to enjoy speaking the names Harry and George out loud. Sometimes they even ran up and down the driveway, calling out to one another as Harry and George. April was usually George and Beth was Harry.
“I used to be as blond as that,” Thien said, wanting to feed them another fantasy, to hear their protests. He pointed to their Barbies. “When I was you guyses’ age back in Vietnam. Then I ate some burnt dog and got sick. I had to stay in bed for three days straight and when I woke up again, my hair was black. It’s been black ever since.”
Beth, who was five, looked quizzically at him. “Hotdog?” she said.
“No, dog. Regular dog. Woof-woof dog,” said Thien. “Where do you think hotdog comes from?”
Immediately the girls threw themselves into a frenzy of gagging sounds. Thien smiled. He stood, leaving the wire cutters to dry at the edge of a nearby pile of lumber, conscious to place them out of at least Beth’s reach; April was old enough by then to know better. He never felt spite toward his little sisters (even though the amount of work Hus made him do while they played could seem unfair), just the desire to make them laugh, to see them act silly. It was not that they didn’t act silly often enough. Hus told them made-up stories, too, and occasionally did things like swing them through the air holding on to their arms as they screamed in delight. For Thien it came as a relief to hear his sisters laugh. He could open himself up to them, in a gentle, playful way, a side of himself he didn’t dare show his peers or parents. And, he had noticed, it seemed to be somewhat the same for Hus. Whenever Thien saw (observing from a distance, bent over his homework or another task) his father playing with his sisters, a feeling of security and hope entered Thien. This Hus was charismatic and theatrical, a compelling storyteller, full of inventive ideas and hilarious facial expressions. Thien had wished the girls would go on intervening in Hus’s plans for the house and property, would keep stalling the rhythms of their work, would never grow up.
“Hey, you see that guy earlier today, that black guy? He go into our bathroom with some puta,” said Jimmy Liu, as they locked up the garage that evening. “I see them walk in the bathroom together, I no see nobody come out right away. Sick!” he added, with pleasurable disgust.
Thien didn’t admit he had witnessed this, too; he offered only a smile of agreement, a lift of his eyebrows, in reaction. For if he admitted it, he realized, he would also have to admit how close he had come in behind them, the suspect couple. And he didn’t want to let on how that had made him feel—implicated, curious—about their activity in there.
It was Valerie who had pursued Thien when they first met; she wasn’t the one he’d been watching initially. It happened at the beach, nearly two summers ago. Thien was playing volleyball with a group of friends from community college. He had come because of a girl, a pretty brunette communications major he was interested in. Her name was Tammy, and to this day he remembered she was wearing a red bikini. He also remembered the pained, surprised expression on her face when he mentioned going for coffee with her and her evasive, noncommittal reply: “Oh, my friend drove me.” Her friend, a strident blond girl named Melissa (too sassy and thin for Thien’s taste), had, it turned out, just run into another friend whom she soon brought back up the beach to the volleyball game. This was Valerie, and it was Valerie whom Thien fell most naturally into conversation with that afternoon. The other girls didn’t like her—this was made plain later, after Valerie had gone her own way again. She was too weird, too loud, and had no style, they said. Thien had felt a pang of chagrin at having been seen talking so readily to the less desirable friend. But in their conversation Valerie had mentioned changing the oil in her car and he had been impressed, had felt compelled to tell her he worked as a mechanic and was always respectful of women who knew how to take care of their own car, because so many didn’t, and they often ended up as victims as a result. A few days later she appeared at his garage, having tracked him down not through the obvious channels (she could’ve asked Melissa or Tammy) but through her own deduction (he’d mentioned certain nearby streets). And as there was no one from school present to witness him saying yes or no to her invitation to go for a drink, he had said yes.
They had a few other things in common. Valerie’s mother, too, had died—years ago, when Valerie was a child—and she was estranged from her stepfather, who still lived in San Bernardino and, she claimed, verbally and physically abused her and her sisters. She’d never known her real father. She was also the eldest of her siblings. She’d left home early before finishing high school and taken up with, first, a motorcycle gang and then various drug-dealer or drifter boyfriends or groups of friends. When she was twenty-one she finally mustered the determination to get herself together. She joined AA, got her GED, said so long to her friends. Thien was struck by her resolve, her clarity and selfknowledge. So what if she was not great-looking, she had other qualities, he would tell himself. At first he enjoyed her axioms about life (lessons from AA), but after some months, after he’d heard her drop these phrases often and indiscriminately enough, they began to annoy him, began to strike him as generic; or was it the way she adhered to them, perhaps, that was generic?
Though he believed he wanted to, he still could not stop seeing her.
He had grown too accustomed to beating himself up in her presence, to her blunt, questioning manner that drew him out of himself, forced him to speak. He despised himself for the things he told her as much as he despised her for being willing to listen.
Mostly, she was oblivious, joking, sardonic, mildly grating but easy to be around. Her understanding of him wholly inadequate. He would find himself explaining his personality to her—pedantically, meticulously, idiotically. This taught him to stand up for his own opinions, but it also reminded him of the way Hus had spoken to him when he was an adolescent (“You don’t know the first thing about the kind of person I am”). Thien would have rather emulated Mone, his stolid friend, and his self-accepting silence, his holding back; his form of celibacy. “What I like about Mone is that he’s a self-sufficient person,” Thien would attest to Valerie,
painfully aware of the lame hint he was making about what he truly wanted to say to her. “He has no need at all for intimate relationships.”
But Valerie was speaking now. “He’s like a bird without a nest. A wheel without an axle.” She sat over her menu in the booth at Denny’s where Mone had joined them for dinner. They were also expecting April, who had phoned Thien from the road an hour earlier, saying she was near San Diego and needed a place to stay for the night. She had driven down to Las Vegas from San Francisco the day before; she was location-scouting for a film project in the desert, she’d said.
Thien gave Valerie an agitated glance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Val.”
“I mean you without your car.” Her eyes brightened abruptly. “No. An egg without a shell,” she said with delight.
Mone glanced over the rim of his water glass, then set the glass down on the table. Thien watched him watch Valerie and couldn’t guess what Mone might be thinking. Mone’s eyes were always a bit hazy, hazy but shrewd. Mone smoked pot. Thien usually found an excuse to leave whenever Mone offered him some. Thien had never been comfortable with people who were too obviously having a good time.
“So I’m worried about my car,” said Thien, “so what? You would be, too.”
“No, I drive a totally crummy piece of shit,” she retorted. “I drive a crummy piece of shit because I don’t give a shit what people think. I wouldn’t give a shit if it disappeared, either. I’m just like that, Thien. I’m different from you. I’m free, my mind is free, my heart is free!” She said this with a vehemence Thien found both infuriating and contradictory to the very concept of carefreeness she was proclaiming; he wished he could point this out to her but didn’t know how. So he slapped the side of his head and pretended to grimace.
“Man, Valerie, you are loud.” He laughed for a second, selfsatisfied.
Valerie brought her hands to her face and announced in a mock-sobbing voice, “Oh, I’m so sad about my car! I can’t sleep, I can’t eat! Oh, oh!” Even louder than before.
“Stop it.” Thien was genuinely irritated. He felt childish.
But Mone was the kind of friend they could bicker in front of. He made no comment and continued to read his menu.
After the waitress took their orders, Thien looked out the window for his sister’s car (1973 Saab, fixed up as a whimsical side project and given to her by Hus, who also paid for her college, Thien knew, as he never had for Thien, as Thien had never expected he would), but he saw no sign of it, its unmissable electric orange. It was a cool, odd little car with a lot of problems—a completely unpragmatic vehicle to give an eighteen-year-old girl who knew or cared nothing about automobiles. She drove it around on long trips as if it were a Chevy Sprint, and more than once it had sprung a leak or popped its ignition coil, leaving her stranded. Already she was half an hour late. She was another female he just didn’t get. Thien knew his ideas were fairly conservative; he would admit he liked women to keep themselves well groomed, to grow their hair long, to wear a little but not too much makeup, to wear skirts during the week, blue jeans on the weekend: feminine but sensible. April’s standards, however, were incomprehensible to him—she was self-righteous, morbid, almost trashy, weird with a capital W (laughingly she had even told him a guy she dated once described her using these words). He was concerned about her but also at times simply annoyed. She was smart, sure, but never practical, never thoughtful. In the years Thien had lived with his aunt, he’d heard this sentiment expressed often about his mother. “Why she do like that, I don’t know,” uncles and aunts said in regard to everything from how she cut her hair short to her lack of religion to how she’d acted (or not acted) during the conflicts between Hus and Thien that had eventually sent Thien out of the house.
When the waitress brought their food, April still had not shown. They ate unexpectantly, as if they’d not been waiting for anyone.
“Hey, where’s your sister?” Mone asked after a while, in a tone of deliberate, nonchalant surprise.
“She’s a chronically late person. She’s sort of aimless like that,” answered Thien. “She thinks she can just quit school and go hang around a movie studio and someone will give her a job. She’s a total dreamer.”
Shortly after he arrived home from dinner, as he was opening a letter from his insurance company, April appeared at his door.
“Hey! Let’s go shopping!” was how he greeted her, surprising even himself with this surge of unguarded jubilation, holding up the claim check from his insurance company. He was pleased to see her, but it was the knowledge of the money, actually, that was making the feelings of anticipation and relief rise in him at that moment.
“All right,” said April skeptically but agreeably. “Hi, Thien.”
“What took you so long?” he asked, cheerfully. They hugged quickly, lightly.
“I was farther away than I thought.”
She did not mind that he had already eaten, she said, to which he told her he had figured as much. It went without saying in their family that they would not go out of the way for each other —in mundane matters at least. They could take care of themselves.
She said, “I need to bring in my stuff.”
Thien followed her out, slipping the check securely back into its envelope first and placing it where he wouldn’t forget it, under his wallet on the hallway phone table. “How’s the car?” This was something he always asked when he saw her.
“Okay. It started overheating a few times and I had to pull over, though. I was going like thirty-five up even the smallest hills.” They laughed about this, though it was the kind of thing Thien wouldn’t have thought was funny if he’d been there when it was actually happening. But it was true there was a hilarity to it, the picture of the ancient orange car struggling. Because it was so obvious it must. They began to joke in the way they usually did about the Saab, in their deep-voice imitations of Hus:
“That German engineering!”
Hus had always spoken in defense of the Saab, despite all of its problems. BMW, Mercedes, Braun, Bang & Olufsen, Glock, Luger. In brand names as in dog breeds Hus remained loyal to his European roots. The Saab sat in Thien’s driveway, creaking with heat. Ludicrously orange, small and outmoded and urbanely European-looking. Thien noticed the inside panels of the doors were off, baring the unpainted, skeletal inner metal framework of the doors. April lifted a large black duffel bag from the backseat.
“You need to always bring along coolant,” said Thien, more seriously.
“I know, I know. I brought water.”
“You’re not putting straight water into that radiator, are you?”
She slung her backpack over her shoulder. “I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“No, never. Always fifty-fifty, water and coolant. Always.” He walked around the car, inspecting. “And what happened here?” He pointed to the doors.
“I had to take them apart. They wouldn’t open.” She put her bags down at the edge of the driveway to show him. She had wrapped a rubber band around two small pieces of a mechanism inside the door because the spring was not working properly. “It happened on this door first, then it happened on that door. I was crawling in through the passenger side all the time. And it keeps happening, so it’s just easier to keep the panels off, I decided.”
Thien laughed. He realized, though, that they were doing what Hus would do. The few times Thien had gone home for the holidays, the first thing Hus always did was show him something: the most recently cut-down tree; a repair on the house; a new retaining wall. Hus, too, walked in a circle around Thien’s car.
“I’m impressed,” said Thien now, making a show of laughing at her rubber bands. She shrugged, smiled haplessly.
Once inside, she began talking about the desert. Long flat stretches of highway, black plains of sand, white plains of sand, the silhouettes of monster windmills atop distant hills, her feeling of a vast, strange awe as she drove, the beautiful bleakness of those listless, t
hankless desert towns; she’d loved it out there, she said, describing it to him with the kind of fervor Thien had only heard when people talked about more unlikely topics—a chance drive in one’s dream vehicle, say, a Lamborghini or Porsche. Here they stood in his kitchen, the ridiculously largest room in the house he rented, with its gleaming, ruddy-textured, white linoleum floors and all its empty white cabinets, as she told him about the desert. She opened and closed his cabinet doors, looking for food, and found finally, to her satisfaction, an old box of instant oatmeal that she claimed was what she usually ate for dinner anyhow, and so she put a pot of water on the stove to boil. Thien watched her with fascination and bewilderment. He was not one to understand being drawn to the desert (or to any large, sparsely populated places at all, for that matter), for he was an advocate of the city, of the proximity of shopping centers and movie theaters and coffeeshops and beaches and other people. He was not one to understand the appeal of long flat stretches of anything or to marvel at such a thing as a “constantly receding horizon.” What was a horizon anyway? It was just a line of land, out there, too far from everywhere else for his comfort.
“You should drive to Las Vegas sometime. You should see it,” she was saying. “It is a totally awful place.”
“And why would I want to go to some place that’s awful, April?” retorted Thien.
April had taken several small metal film canisters, flat and circular like pizza pans, out of her black duffel bag and was now placing them in his refrigerator. He wanted to ask if she planned to eat those tins later, or make some kind of joke about it, but she had already shown him her camera, a boxy black plastic-and-metal apparatus that seemed too rectangular to record motion (had been Thien’s first thought at the sight of it—the lens was short and placed asymmetrically above two smaller lenses that looked like mini-eyes), and his sister handled it with such serious, casual dexterity that he felt wary, now, trying to mock her.