by Jamie Gilson
We’d driven to the church almost straight from the airport, stopping at home just long enough to go to the toilet and unload the bags and boxes. We arrived at the big bash around one-thirty. The committee had planned this special lunch so everybody could meet the folks right away. A WELCOME TO PITTSFIELD NGUYEN FAMILY banner like mine, only much bigger, was draped on a string across the big all-purpose room in the church. Under it, the food tables were packed with everything from celery sticks to sheets of coconut cake.
Tuan and his dad stood next to Jeff in a kind of reception line, like at a wedding, though their smiles weren’t quite as beamish as when they had gotten off the plane. In a chair next to the wall, Mrs. Nguyen sat under a basketball hoop where red, white, and blue streamers fluttered every time someone opened the door. You couldn’t tell what she was thinking, and you couldn’t help but wonder.
“Why, Agnes Shorter, wonderful to have you with us this bright October day.” Jeff’s voice carried like he was giving a sermon. He reached for her hand with both of his. “Nam Nguyen, this is Agnes Shorter. Nam here is young Tuan’s dad, Agnes. You heard about Tuan’s mom being sick?” He reached over and gave Tuan’s shoulder a squeeze.
The kid smiled and nodded. “Nam Nguyen,” Jeff moved on to the next greeter, “this is Charlie Quackenbush, runs the grocery store. Nam was a soldier in the war, Charlie.”
The two Nguyens stood there smiling, shaking hands. A reporter from the Pittsfield Examiner flashed pictures.
“Don’t look at the camera,” she told them, and they looked.
“Hey, Tuan,” I yelled, “aren’t you hungry?” I motioned him over.
Quint laughed. “Here, pooch!” he said. “Naughty, naughty, Zilch. Nice boys don’t use their hands like that.” And I remembered that calling the kid by curling my finger at him was part of Suzanna’s Forbidden List.
Jeff was talking to him, sending him over to us. I shrugged. “Anyway, I took them down the stairs, instead,” I explained, wanting to finish up the story before the kid got there and thought I was making fun of him.
“So, what’d they think?” Quint made one of his crazy faces, crossing only one eye. “They think a big, bad dragon was going to suck them down its long steel tongue? My uncle says they believe in dragons.” The kids laughed.
Tuan crossed the hall filled with people who’d taken off from Saturday chores just to see him. They watched him walk and called, “Hi, there,” smiling. By the time he stood next to us, though, the kids were quiet. Not sure what to say or do, they stared down at their toes, and then over at Tuan’s blue rubber thongs.
A couple of fourth-grade girls started giggling from the quiet, said quick how-are-you’s and then hurried on down the food line.
“Let’s eat,” I told the kid. This, I decided, was the time to begin his lessons. I started scooping stuff onto my big white paper plate, naming everything as I dropped it from the spoon. I did it slow. “Raspberry Jell-O mold with marshmallows. Green-bean casserole with onion rings. Carrot sticks. Pickled beets. Fried chicken.” I held up a drumstick so he could see. My plate was getting heavy.
“Flat-tires-and-gra-vy.” Quint dipped up macaroni salad. “Mouse-traps-with-pic-kle-rel-ish.” He was trying to ruin everything. Billy and Simon covered their mouths to keep from breaking up.
There was still some space left in the middle of my plate. “Baked beans,” I said louder to drown out Quint, “and,” as I speared one, “a hot dog.”
The kid gave me a funny look. “Hot dog?” he asked.
“Right,” I told him, glad to hear him talk again. “I could eat them every day.”
“You got to eat a hot dog,” Quint told him. He stuck his fork into one and let it drop in the middle of Tuan’s plate. “It’s the all-American food.”
Quint, Billy, and Simon followed the new kid and me to a long table with a huge pumpkin and some Indian corn as a centerpiece. We sat down and Tuan put his hands in his lap, watching as I squooshed the hot dog into the middle of a mound of baked beans. He picked up his fork and held it like he didn’t know how. Showing it to us, he asked, “Name, please?”
“Name is porcupine.” Quint grinned. Billy and Simon poked at each other.
“It is not. Quint, stop being a jerk. It’s called a fork. Fork.”
“Por-cu—?”
“Fork. Forget him. His name is Quint,” I said, as though that explained it. Then I told him Billy’s and Simon’s names. They giggled like he was a TV show and couldn’t hear them.
Everybody was eating as they talked. Wolfing it down. Saturday-noon starved. Except the kid. He was just watching. Carefully he shifted his fork to hold it the way we did, bent his head low over his plate, and kind of slurped some beans into his mouth with it.
“What’d you call a fork in Vietnam?” I asked. He didn’t understand, and so I said it again slower, with motions.
He picked up his knife and fork and worked the two of them together with one hand.
“Chopsticks!” Simon yelled. And that’s what it was. He was used to chopsticks.
“Here’s how you do it, kid.” Quint speared his hot dog in the middle, lifted it in front of him and began to bite from first one end and then the other. Billy and Simon loved it. They started doing the same thing, laughing so hard they couldn’t swallow. Julia must have seen the hot-dog propellers from across the room because she came over and stood half behind me to watch, amazed.
“Eat hot dog many times?” Tuan asked Billy.
“Oh, sure!” Billy whirled away. “My mom says I should read on the label what’s really in them, but she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I eat them just about every day.”
“I learn dog is … friend … here.”
“Pet,” I told him. “The word is pet.”
“Pet. Not pet in Vietnam. Dog eat too much.” He watched Simon twirl and bite. “Please, you eat cat, too?”
“Eat cat!” Simon said. “Yuck.”
“Double yuck.” Billy put down his fork and moved away from the kid like he had something catching. “I think he thinks these things are made out of real dogs.”
“Why not?” Quint pushed his plate away. “They make your stomach growl.” Then he got up and gave a little bow. “Kid, I think you should know this. Here in the U.S.A., we eat our dogs hot. Cats we eat cold.”
Julia’s lip began to tremble. “Are hot dogs really made out of …?” She couldn’t finish. “Like Maudie? Is that why they’re called …?”
“Really, truly,” Quint told her with a straight face. He bowed again and said, “Quint go. See you around, Hot Dog.”
Billy and Simon grabbed their half-full plates, dumped them into the garbage can, and followed him. “Wait up!” Billy yelled.
Julia ran too. “Mother!” she called. “Is it true?”
The kid looked at the food on his plate like he thought it might suddenly start to sing and dance.
“It’s not dog meat,” I told him. “It’s just pork.” I cut a chunk off my hot dog and jabbed the air with it. “Pork!”
“Pork.” He nodded.
Now he thinks it’s called a pork, I decided, so I dug a pencil from my pocket and drew a curly-tailed pig on the paper tablecloth. “Pig,” I said. Information In.
“Pig,” he repeated cheerfully. “Yes.” It occurred to me that the Information In hadn’t connected.
“Pig is pork.” I bit my lip. It wasn’t all that easy. “Hot dogs are pork.” The kid smiled. “Yes?”
Harvey, I thought. You’ve done it again. It’s your two-plus-two-equals-two-hundred-twenty-two act. Then the old light bulb flashed on over my head. I put an equals sign after the pig and drew a hot dog.
“Oh, yes?” he said. “Hot pig.” He speared it the way Quint had and bit off the end. “Good.”
“Does your father speak English?” I asked.
“Father …” He glanced over to where his father and grandmother were now eating with a big group. “Father is speaking … a little.”
“How come you know so much?”
“I”—he shrugged—“no … no good.”
“But who taught you?” Somebody had gotten to him before I could.
“American man. Mr. Larkin. At Galang camp.” He reversed the hot dog and took another bite. “We wait in camp many month. First we come from Vietnam in boat. Then in Galang we wait. Mr. Larkin look for sponsor for us in America. Mr. Larkin say, ‘Tuan learn English. In America must have English.’ He say, ‘Tuan help family. Tuan learn English.’” He flipped the hot dog and bit again. It looked like fun. I speared mine in the middle and bit it. “I try. I be American quick.”
“Sure. I’ll teach you English. I spoke it since I was a baby. It’s easy.”
He shook his head. “Very hard. Some sounds hard. Also, in Vietnam no say, ‘Today I eat. Yesterday I …’”
“Ate,” I finished for him. He was repeating a lesson. I could tell. “Yesterday I ate. Tomorrow I will eat.”
“Will eat. Vietnamese say, ‘Today I eat. Tomorrow I eat. Yesterday I eat.’”
“No kidding? That sounds easy.”
“Yes?” Then he leaned forward, really interested. “What means no kidding? You say many times, ‘No kidding.’”
He had me. What does no kidding mean? I didn’t want to seem dumb. I say it all the time. I had to know what it meant. I cleared my throat. “Well, sometimes,” I explained, “it kind of means, like, ‘Wow!’”
“Wow,” he repeated, and waited.
“Sometimes it means, like, ‘Do you really mean that?’”
He smiled at me mildly and said, “Yes?”
I was getting nowhere … again. “Sometimes it means ‘That’s true,’ like when I say, ‘I’ve got seven hundred fifty beer cans in my collection, no kidding.’” Well, maybe I didn’t have quite that many, but I figured he didn’t know numbers anyway, and seven hundred fifty is such a good round number.
“No kidding,” he said.
“You got it!” I yelled, but he didn’t, of course. He was just repeating.
“You guys thirsty?” Caroline smiled from across the table. She held out two big ice-filled foam cups. Suzanna was with her, hugging a big pitcher of tea. They’d just come from twelve-thirty band practice at the high school down the street. So had a lot of other kids who were probably eating second lunches, scooping mashed potatoes and hot pigs onto their plates.
Caroline sat the cups in front of us while Suzanna put the pitcher down, crossed her hands behind her back, and looked at Tuan like she was memorizing him. “My-name-is-Su-zan-na-Brooks,” she said.
The kid reached his hand toward her as if he’d done it all his life. “Hi,” he said.
Suzanna stepped back. “Why is he doing that?” she asked me.
“He shakes hands.” I looked at Caroline, and she winked at me. The hairs on the back of my neck tickled. Suzanna wiped her palm dry on her skirt, and shook his hand.
“Yes, thank you.” I raised my cup to her. Frowning, she grabbed the pitcher and filled the cup with tea, clinking the ice. Then she poured some into the kid’s cup, sneaking a look at him out of the corners of her eyes.
I reached for the bowl of sugar next to the Indian corn and heaped in three spoonfuls.
“Want some sugar?” I asked him. He smiled but didn’t seem to understand. Maybe the computer in his head didn’t have sugar yet. Harvey Trumble to the rescue! “Sugar.” The crystals cascaded into his cup like a snow slide. He repeated the word, and I glanced at Suzanna to see if she was impressed.
“Your mother told me to tell you to meet her in the parking lot in five minutes,” she said.
“His name is Tuan.” I pushed the cup toward him. Tea is a big thing in Vietnam and places like that. Everybody knows it.
“You like it here yet?” Caroline asked him, taking it slow.
“Yes,” he told her, waited a second, and then added, “no kidding.”
Suzanna gagged. “No kidding?” She looked at me with her mouth hanging open. Nothing she could say. This was going much better than I could have hoped. Quint thought he was being funny, but the kid was almost a Harvey clone already.
Stirring the sugar that had sunk to the bottom of my cup, I picked it up and chugged it down. The tea was sweet, cold, and terrific.
The kid watched and then raised his foam cup and started to chug the way I had, but somehow it didn’t work for him. His eyes opened wide. He choked. He gasped and, trying to catch his breath, flipped the cup upside down on his plate. I tried to remember the Heimlich maneuver.
His plate was awash, the paper tablecloth was spreading brown, and his blue pants were soaked from the overflow. Suzanna banged him on the back.
“I bet he likes it better hot,” Caroline said. “Better hot?”
When the kid caught his breath he said, “Snow.”
“Ice,” I corrected him. “Ice.”
Either that or he was telling Caroline no. Anyway, after we had soaked up a batch of paper napkins on the table and on Tuan, Suzanna and Caroline grabbed their jackets and clarinets and we all trekked out into the big gravel parking lot in back. My mom, Julia, and the rest of the Nguyens sat patiently in the station wagon. Billy, Simon, and Quint were skidding their bikes in the stones.
“Well, well,” Quint called, “if it isn’t the Hot Dog himself”—he pulled up in front of Suzanna—“with a genuine dill pickle.” She scowled. “And that hilarious kid Harvey must have said something really wacko to make the Hot Dog laugh that hard.” He pointed to Tuan’s pants. Billy and Simon nearly wet theirs laughing.
“Ignore him,” Suzanna told Tuan.
“That’s OK.” Quint shrugged. “He doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.”
“That doesn’t make it right to say, you dolt.” Suzanna gave his bike a push.
The kid shivered. “You didn’t bring a coat, did you?” I asked him. I couldn’t remember whether Mom had given him one to wear. “Do-you-have-ever-y-thing?”
He stopped suddenly, reached into his wet pants pocket, and, smiling, pulled out a small green fabric bag. He sighed, like he was glad to find it still there. It was drawn tight with a string, and soaked with tea.
Quint wheeled in to look. “What’s he got?”
“Quint!” Suzanna shook her head. “You’d be a great kid if you’d start minding your own business.”
He shrugged. “Just being friendly.”
But the kid seemed to want to show us. And even Suzanna stared at the bag as he squeezed it dry, untied the string, and stuck his fingers inside. First he took out a couple of small metal balls that looked like ball bearings, wiped them on his shirt, and put them in his dry pocket. Then he picked out what I thought might be a jewel, an old family treasure, maybe, he’d smuggled in to sell for a million dollars. But it wasn’t. It was a marble, about an inch across, clear, with a bright blue eye-shaped wedge set deep in the middle.
He held it to the light so we could see and then placed it on his palm. The marble shone as if it might have been a tiny crystal ball full of fortunes about mysterious strangers and long ocean trips.
“Name, please?” the kid asked.
“Marble,” I said quick before Quint could tell him it was a toenail. “Marble.”
I was about to ask if the bag had more in it like the blue one when we heard “Aieeeeeee” on both sides of us. Then “Aieeeeeeeeee,” the yell came again, and louder. Billy and Simon, screeching, were heading straight at us on their bikes like they meant to weave us between their spokes.
We scrambled. They hit the brakes and swerved, turning completely around and raising a spray of gravel. Caroline and Tuan both panicked, ran head-on, and slid across the stones in opposite directions.
Billy hopped off his bike. “Hey, we’re sorry. We thought you’d trust us.”
“We’re good,” Simon explained, wheeling up. “We do it all the time. It kills tires, though. Are you maimed?”
“What a stupid….” Caroline’s barrette had sprung free, and she blew the hair out of
her eyes.
The kid got to his feet fast. You could see pink gravel dents in his elbows. The minute he was up, though, a scared look flashed across his face, and he dropped back to his knees, saying something I couldn’t understand. He shuffled through the stones in a circle around him and then held up an empty cupped hand. The marble was gone.
Quint started searching on hands and knees. So did Suzanna. Caroline, winded, sat with her clarinet case in her lap.
“What are we looking for?” Simon asked.
“The Hot Dog’s marble.” Quint sat down on the stones and leaned against Caroline while the rest of us crawled all over the lot. Mom even came and searched. But there was no telling where his marble had flipped. Those guys had tornadoed the gravel.
“You’ll just have to try tomorrow,” Mom said finally, with a sigh. “We have to get these folks home. They’re tired.”
And so we were all gearing up to go, discouraged, when Quint suddenly sprang to his feet like just-popped toast.
“You’re not going to believe this, Hot Dog,” he said, clamping his hand on Tuan’s shoulder, “but I know where that marble is.” We all stared at him. I mean, he’d watched us hunt for maybe ten minutes without saying anything. “I personally wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but …” He made a big thing out of reaching into my jacket pocket. Whipping out his hand, he held the marble up between two fingers. “Harvey, your new buddy Harvey, had it all the time.” Handing the marble to Tuan, he slapped me too hard on the back.
The kids all rolled their eyes and groaned. They knew Quint and his magic tricks. He was famous for them. Suzanna chased after him till he hopped onto his bike and outraced her to the street.
But Tuan didn’t know Quint. For all he knew, he was staying with Attila the Hun—pillage, plunder, and all that. I shrugged my shoulders, threw up my hands like, “What’re you going to do?” and added a weak “ha-ha.” I mean, how do you say “sleight-of-hand” to a new kid using first-day words?