by Junot Díaz
He went out in the brush for more firewood and brooded over the fire until morning.
John found a pawnshop in Littleton to sell a sword, The American History of Folk Music, and several rings. The man slowly counted out five twenties, and over his glasses watched John, who was pacing off his nerves. John could see small alarms going off in the pawnbroker’s eyes, could sense it coming.
“These things are yours to sell, right?”
John strode over to the counter.
“You want them or not?”
“Well, now I’m sure I don’t know.”
John swept the rings into his hand and stuffed them into his jeans, tucked the LPs under his arm, and gathered up the sword and scabbard, all the while glaring at the clerk, expecting the man to stop him. But he didn’t.
“Asshole,” John said.
“Get on out of here before I call the cops.”
The sun quaked overhead and the light flashing off the worn white roadway was too much to even look around. He made straight for the car. He tossed the sword and the records into the trunk and slid into the front seat, but Daniel was not inside and nowhere about. He pulled his sunglasses from behind the visor and went to look for his goddamn brother.
He walked up the block past the pawnshop onto a main street that was nearly abandoned, save a few cars parked on the main drag, one of which was a squad car with a policeman in it. He nodded at the policeman and crossed the street and felt the cop’s eyes on him the whole way as he passed the closed-up storefronts and peered uselessly into the tinted opaque windows of the bars for his brother. This was pointless. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and immediately started walking back to the car, patting his pockets and pantomiming that he’d forgotten his wallet.
The girl, Gwen, was sitting on the hood of the car, her legs crossed behind Daniel, who stood between them. The skin on the back of John’s head tingled at the sight of her. Daniel turned around.
“Now look, John. You might as well know right now that she comes with us or I want half my money and we’ll go our separate ways.”
John ignored him and went around and got into the driver’s seat. Daniel opened the passenger door. The squad car slid past, the cop looking in their direction, and Daniel’s voice was lost in John’s ears. This was real trouble, you could see how it would go down, right here in Littleton: the runaway with seaweed streaks in her hair, the suspicious pawnbroker, the squad car slowing to stop, red-and-blues lit up. Just like the old man.
“Get in,” John said.
“I mean it, John. I’m not gonna let you leave her here—”
“Just get in!”
Daniel and Gwen hopped in the back together with her bag. John pulled out of the lot and went up the street. Nothing happened. He took to the highway and nothing happened. They drove for two hours, nothing happened. They weren’t pulled over, they weren’t surrounded as he filled the tank in Ballinger, and they weren’t dragged from the tent in the night. Their father didn’t materialize out of the dark, fumy and distorted with rage. But John did not sleep, such was his dread.
John could hear them kiss with glacial quiet so as not to wake him, and when they could take it no longer, they snuck out to the car to do it. But the rear window was cracked open and he could hear their moans as the car gently rocked like a boat in a wake, and when they were finished, John could hear her quietly crying and Daniel saying things in a slow, sad way, how a person might talk to a wounded animal or a child who was stuck in a well. Somehow Daniel was good, a good person. And John felt terrifically alone and strained to hear exactly what they communed, but it wasn’t for him however much he might want, deserve, or need it, people don’t get what they deserve, everything oh every last thing is given out at random.
They were nearing a town called Casper that John said might be promising when Daniel asked why they weren’t going west. Gwen had taken the map and was having Daniel pose her questions.
“We are going west.”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel said, looking at the place she pointed to on the map.
“Casper is east of us,” Gwen said. “It’s not even a day away from Indiana.”
John turned on the radio, panned the dial for something to listen to.
“We’re going in circles,” Gwen said.
The house in Casper was locked, but John got on a milk crate and pried open the bathroom window with a crowbar. He squirmed through the hole and peeked back out at his brother below. He told him to go wait in the car.
“What? Fuck that.”
“Honk twice if you see anything.”
John closed the window on his brother’s protests and strode briskly down the hall. At the end were two bedrooms. One was a child’s room. A small table. Bunk beds. Vases, flowers, scrapbooks. There were balls of tissue, and pictures of the children were fanned out over the floor next to a half glass of wine.
John didn’t understand until he went into the other room. On the bed were two black dresses, and shoes spilled out of the closet. When he realized what had happened to the children he couldn’t seem to get enough air and the inside of his chest felt like a twisted bed sheet. He sat on the floor, his vision pinholed, taking big lungfuls of air.
When he felt okay again, he stood. His head was a heavy gourd and he was very tired. He looked inside the closet and the dresser and saw no clothes for a man. He sat on the bed and dropped back onto the dresses and bedclothes. The air was cool and still and no sound punctured the air’s dull nothing hum. His heartbeat slowed. He was very tired.
There had been two sharp honks, but he remembered the sound of them only when he heard the front door opening. The pad of feet on the runner in the hall. He rolled off the bed and scuttled under it just as a woman came in, pulling off her pumps. She unzipped, and her dress fell smartly to the floor. She left the room, and he started to slide out from under the bed, but she immediately returned and he wriggled back underneath. She sat down and opened a drawer in the bedside table. She got all the way onto the bed and was at something, but he could not tell what. In a few moments, he heard a lighter and smelled marijuana. She moved against the headboard and smoked. There was a knock at the front door, but she was still and he was still. He wondered how she couldn’t sense him under there, hear him breathing, feel his body heat. He could tell everything she was doing and she had no idea he was down there. Another knock. He wondered if it was Daniel. Go away, he thought, even though he wanted to escape. Leave her alone.
She lit the joint again and smoked and for long minutes it was quiet. He couldn’t think of a way to reveal himself that wouldn’t scare the hell out of her. He would’ve liked to explain. Apologize, even commiserate. But it would be unbearably cruel to scare her now.
A long, thin sound as through reed without an instrument escaped her and turned into a slow moan and then outright sobbing. Heaving. The covers churned up as she must have been clutching and writhing in them. By the way the bed sometimes bounced under her, the mattress sagging and just kissing his chest when she did so, he imagined her pelvis high up and then dropping.
For minutes she was still, and then she would remember or want to cry some more and she would start up again. Hours it went like this. The house would go still for so long that he thought she might be asleep, and he would be about to slide out from under the bed, and she would begin sobbing again. So often that he quit feeling bad for her. So often that it was now dusk, now dark, now the bottomless night.
He woke to her breathing, slow and steady, the sleeper’s breathing. He moved out from under the bed, crouched where he could see the back of her head. He wanted to pet her brown hair, to see her face. He bear-crawled to the door. In the hall he stood. A truck somewhere outside shifted gears and he waited until it passed, then unlocked the front door, closed it softly behind him, and strode out into the naked day.
He went up the street, refreshed from the sleep that’d been forced on him, the first good sleep in a long time. He felt okay.
He spotted the car in front of a café. They wanted to know where he’d been, what had happened to him. He looked like shit, they said. He told them to order him a coffee and went to the bathroom to wash his face.
He drove all day and through the night, his brother and Gwen curled up in the backseat asleep. He pulled into town, got a local paper, and scanned the obituaries. The day was dawning. He took the county road and stopped by the field.
Daniel woke up, got out to pee, and then sat on the rear bumper with his brother.
“What the fuck are we doing?” Daniel asked.
“You remember when I busted up all those pumpkins?”
“With the hammer?”
“The old man beat the hell out of you for it. Even though I did it.”
The patch had already been harvested, Cartwright’s pickup in the field, the trailer full of pumpkins. Daniel’s sigh steamed out into the cold air.
“So you’re going over there,” he said.
John nodded.
“You don’t need to.”
“You two can just drop me off.”
“We can just keep going.”
John looked over at his brother. “He has it coming, Dan.”
John went inside, where his father lay on the couch in the throes of his last fever. The sound of the screen door clapping shut and the sight of his son startled him.
“What in the hell are you at?” he rasped. “Sneaking in here like this.”
His father reached under the cushions and drew out an old revolver, but it promptly slipped from his hand onto the hardwood floor, thudding harmless as a hammer. The old man didn’t reach for it, he was too winded even from this effort. The air rattled in and out of him, his eyes watered from an undisclosed agony. When John stepped forward to pick up the gun, his father’s eyes raced about for something to defend himself against this inevitability.
But John noticed how little his father’s fear or this profound reversal pleased him and he just stood there, waiting for rage as one might a train on a platform.
“Do what you come to do!” his father hissed.
John went out onto the porch, the old man coughing terribly. He waved at Daniel and Gwen to go on. Daniel scowled and then backed out and drove away, and John realized how he must’ve looked to them with the pistol, like all kinds of trouble, but the old man was well killed already and there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing to do but see him off.
LISA KO
Pat + Sam
FROM Copper Nickel
1
BEFORE THE PARTY Pat spent an hour crying in her bedroom—her and Harry’s room, their old room—and used up a stick of concealer trying to hide the crinkled half-moons under her eyes. She left the girls with the neighbors. She put on lipstick. At the party she asked Sam Kwan for a light.
It was a cold October night in 1974. They smoked back then, everybody did. This was before Pat’s two children became Sam’s and before there were three children, before they grounded the oldest when Pat found a pack of Newports in her room. By then they would have forgotten their own youth, or rather, they would hold their children to higher standards. The children would be confident and happy—they’d feel entitled to happiness—and for that Pat and Sam would resent them.
Pat told Sam she used to live in the city, but now she lived in Jersey. Some friends had invited her to the party, so she’d driven out to her old neighborhood in Queens. “Where I live,” she said, “it’s like the country, but there’s a train to the city.”
Sam told Pat he lived in Brooklyn and never went to New Jersey. “It must be nice to have trees and grass.”
The apartment was a dump, the room too hot and crowded, the moss-green carpet balding in patches, like a neglected lawn. To the right of the sunken couch was a folding table with a paper plate of pretzel crumbs, a six-pack of beer, and a plastic jug of deli gin.
“What’s the guy’s name that lives here?” Pat asked in Cantonese.
Sam recognized the words and said, “I have no idea. My friend Ben invited me.”
Sam’s laugh was a joyful bark, and Pat thought she saw, through his thick eyeglasses, the glint of a troublemaker.
The music surged. Annabelle Uy leaped off the couch and started shaking her hips, rear end plump and wide like a bakery bun. “Dance, Pat, dance,” Annabelle shouted, pointing to Pat, and Pat looked at Sam and he shrugged—why not.
Even if she didn’t care that much about dancing, Sam’s willingness to do so made him more appealing. They danced, not terribly, but not particularly well. Their shoulders remained hunched, feet rooted to the floor. Their arms swung slowly but they moved closer to each other.
The next day Pat’s mother called and said, “I don’t know how you do it, all alone in that big house with two little children. All alone and nobody to help you. I don’t see why you can’t move back to Chicago already.”
“All right, Ma,” Pat said. “I met someone.”
“Who?”
“He’s Chinese. We’re going out next Saturday.”
“Oh?”
“He has a good job. And he knows all about the kids and Harry.”
“And he’s still talking to you? There must be something wrong with him.”
“Nothing’s wrong with him!”
“But he’ll want his own house.”
“He likes New Jersey. He thinks it’s nice.”
Her mother made a pleased, cooing sound.
2
He had never been with a woman longer than four months, and that was years ago, in Hong Kong, with a girl named Helen whose voice could peel the skin off babies. Sam was just her type; locked up, quiet-angry, a kid who had lived in ten different homes after his father left and his mother went to find work in Singapore. In Hong Kong he had wanted to be a musician. He put on his one good outfit and went to the Sunday afternoon tea dances when he could afford it, screamed and danced to The Lotus belting out I’ll be waiting I’ll be waiting I’ll be waiting, the chorus pressing into him like a thumb against a vein. He could strum a guitar and keep a beat but that’s as far as his music dreams went. His high school teachers said engineering was the way to get a student visa, so he put engineering on his application and Nebraska gave him a full scholarship. After four long years in Omaha he boarded a bus for New York, watched the flat fields of the Midwest bump by as if they were unspooling toilet paper, ready to flush down the drain.
New York was a platter of girls: towering blonds with custard tits, smooth-skinned babes with sultry lips. When Sam talked it felt like his words were crisscrossing in the air, scrambled before they landed. Things that sounded fine in his mind left his mouth and entered women’s ears in some garbled syntax. “Nice dress,” he said, and they looked at him like he’d groped them on the subway. “Buy you a drink?” They’d recoil like he’d spit in theirs.
He went to record stores and jazz clubs and sat alone in the back. What they saw: a scrawny Chinese guy, barely any meat on his bones, five-foot-seven on a good day, Coke-bottle glasses, cheap clothes, an underfed accountant’s underfed accountant loser brother. They saw a man who couldn’t dance. They heard a man who couldn’t sing. But in his leaky water-balloon heart, Sam could sing and dance. In the apartment he shared with a rotating cast of roommates, he locked the door to his room and played records on his turntable, James Brown and Maceo Parker, Sly Stone. It felt like being unraveled.
I lost someone, my love
Someone who’s greater than the stars above
I wanna hear you scream!
He hadn’t lost a love like that. His father—that was a loss, but not of a real person, only the idea of father. Yet there was always a feeling of incompleteness, a reaching for, a wanting of. Some thread left unstitched. The missing chunk. Late at night in his room, he dreamed of meeting a woman who would understand all of that, who’d be able to listen to music and feel the notes crawl up her spine, who would sing along, who would dance with him, who would leave him alone.
Hi
s buddy Ben lived with a girl named Lily in a studio apartment in Chinatown that smelled like overcooked eggs, both of them skinny enough that they’d sometimes share clothes. The idea of living with a girl seemed as improbable to Sam as waking up on the moon. Shacking up, Ben called it. He cheated on Lily with a college girl who wore matching dresses, shoes, and panties and a rich jook-sing with a Pomeranian that slept in her bed and woke him up by licking his toes. “We’re too young to be tied down,” Ben told Sam, and Sam pictured himself splayed out on his back, limbs spread, hands and feet tied snugly to four posts in the ground, Helen from Hong Kong triple knotting the ropes.
Pat was a woman with very little curve to her, smooth hips and flat ass, dark hair permed into a frizzy halo. Behind rounded red frames, her eyes were wet and giant, her nose and mouth miniature. She had the look of a doll owl. Doll owl, Sam thought, turning the words around in his mouth.
“Fire me up.” Those were the first words she said to him, the sentence he would later see as the spark; or, on worse days, the culprit.
She wanted a light—she wanted to be fired up.
3
On the night of her and Sam’s first official date, Pat had already spoken on the phone to her mother and Annabelle Uy.
“Make sure you look good for once,” her mother said. “It wouldn’t kill you to put on a little makeup and wear a dress. Wear heels because you’re such a little shrimp. But not too-high heels. Remember, you don’t want to be taller than the man. You haven’t gained any weight, have you?”
Annabelle said, “I asked Jack Ng who asked Ben Chan who said that Sam was quiet but a stand-up guy. But really? You gotta watch out for those quiet ones. He must like you if he’s going all the way out to New Jersey. Watch out!”
Pat was dressed in red slacks and a cream-colored, V-neck blouse, curls sprayed tight, mascara and eyeliner carefully applied. Sam was arriving on the six o’clock train. Lynette and Cynthia were wearing corduroys and turtlenecks, hair pulled into long pigtails. The Mulligans up the block were out of town, the Antonicellis already had plans for the night, and Pat didn’t know anyone else in Warwick, so she told the girls they were going out for dinner with a friend.