Return to Dust

by Andrew Lanh

  I nodded.

  “He said: ‘When you are troubled, act. Be bold.’”

  “I can’t act until I have…” I stopped.

  She leaned into me. “When you hold a book, you forget to look into someone’s eyes.”

  “I do both.”

  She wasn’t listening to me. “A book is only as good as the hand that holds it. When you close the book, what’s missing?” She actually winked. “Buddha says, ‘There are not holes in eternity. What is missing is already filled in.’”

  “Grandma…” Hank began.

  “You’re telling me that I already have the answer?” I stared into her face.

  “All you have to do is open your eyes—read the page you skipped over.”

  “Thank you.” I bowed.

  “More coffee now.” She bowed back. “And sesame buns for sweetness.”

  Hank’s mother pointed to the living room. “If you two stay here gabbing with Grandma, we will never eat.”

  Sitting in the living room, I faced Hank. “Aunt Marie?”

  “You got me, Rick. Nobody tells me anything.”

  “You do know that she’s here for a reason.”

  “Well, she does stop in to see Mom now and then. She doesn’t drive, dropped off by Willie for the afternoon. They cook piles of rice cakes.”

  “But…” I pointed a finger toward the kitchen, a purposeful quizzical expression on my face.

  He cut me off. “Yeah, I know. Something is going on.” A slapdash grin covered his face. “This has all the hallmarks of a behind-the-scenes conspiracy.”

  So we sat quietly, listening to the three women bustling in the kitchen, laughing, gossiping. Pans banged against a counter, the sizzle of heated oil. But Aunt Marie was saying very little, a few, scattered monosyllabic responses, hesitant. Grandma and Hank’s mother were chatting about some neighbor, a rambling tale of midnight indiscretion spotted by Grandma who’d gone into the kitchen for a glass of water and happened—“I am not one to peek from a window, you know that”—to spot the misalliance in the next-door driveway. A fresh round of wonderful laughter.

  “Relax,” I said to Hank, who was squirming.

  The living room was a tight, square room, probably little-used because the family lived its life in the kitchen. Cluttered with too much overstuffed furniture, threadbare and draped in floral sheets, the room looked forbidding, a solemn place you brought strangers for coffee. Insurance salesmen, schoolteachers, folks you didn’t know how to entertain. What jarred me, although pleasantly, was the collection of watercolors positioned on the walls, a display of schoolroom art executed by one of the younger children, Phoung, the thirteen-year-old girl, whose first name dominated the tops of each of the drawings. Hank spotted my eyes drifting from one to another.

  “Phoung at summer art camp, sponsored by the Hartford Courant.”

  The young girl had fashioned clunky pastoral scenes of an imagined Vietnam, perhaps copied from travel guides, glossy photographs painstakingly rendered in watercolor paint that dripped onto and smudged the paper.

  “Dad thinks she’s Picasso, proud as hell.” He pointed at one particularly horrid drawing and whispered, “A failed Rorschach ink blot.”

  Each drawing was encased in an oversized gilt frame. The effect was startling, true, but I found the drawings comforting. Perhaps a dozen of them hung lopsidedly, each in a garish gold frame. They held me, these childlike images, because there was about them a soft sentimentality—the land of her parents filtered now through the hazy lens of an American childhood. They spoke a real love, a family that celebrated their children. Touched by it, maybe stupidly envious, I told this to Hank now. “Devotion.”

  “At any price,” he replied.

  The bustle in the kitchen suddenly stopped, the hiss of the gas stove ceasing, quiet, quiet.

  Aunt Marie stepped into the living room, her hands dangling at her side, her face drawn. A sweep of wind slammed the window, a branch banged against the siding, and she drew in her breath.

  “What is it, Aunt Marie?” Hank asked, half-rising.

  As she waved him away, she sat down next to me. “I am here for a reason,” she said in a soft but carefully modulated English. A rehearsed speech practiced over the kitchen stove, probably edited by Grandma.

  I nodded at her. “I guessed that.”

  She sucked in her breath. “My son Xinh…” she began slowly. Then, shaking her head, she used his American name. “My Tony…he…”

  She folded her hands into her lap, a prim gesture, closed her eyes tightly but immediately snapped them wide open.

  “Aunt Marie.” Hank’s voice quivered. He shot a confused look toward the kitchen. Silence there. Grandma and his mother probably listening at the door, now shut.

  “Tell me,” I said gently, though my heart raced.

  Her voice trembled. “He cannot bring himself to talk to you. His pride.” She gulped. “His fear.”

  “Of what?” Hank interrupted.

  I faced Hank. “Hank, let me do this.”

  He nodded.

  “Ever since you came to the apartment to talk to my husband Vuong—Willie—he worries. My Tony worries. Maybe a murder now, he thinks, and he is afraid of what he did.” She bit her lip. “You are”—a long pause—“like the authority. Like looking into it all.”

  “Tell me.” My voice even softer. A sliver of a smile. “I’m a friend, Aunt Marie.”

  She ignored that. The words spilled out of her. “Back in April when he had the fight with Marta Kowalski, I mean, when she said his look threatened her—it wasn’t a fight because he will never fight…Before she called the police on him. I mean, after that…After, not before. I’m confused. But my Tony was so mad at her. He felt his father had been hurt too much already. Willie, you know, is a man you have to be careful with, so hurt, and so ready to break…a good man, a hard worker, talk nice to you, and friendly. Well, my Tony wanted to confront Marta. Maybe make her understand what she…do to that man.”

  Hank squirmed. Color rose in his cheeks.

  “He drove to her house to talk to her. So dumb, yes. He didn’t know what else to do.”

  “But why?”

  She shrugged. “He got this anger and he felt…to yell at her…something to let her know what a horrible, mean woman she was. How the cops looked at Willie. The American police in the house, standing there.”

  “What happened?”

  She looked away, then turned back. “Nothing. Tony—he sat in front of the house. Sat there. She was not home so he waited. An hour maybe. Stupid. He went home.” She glanced at Hank, a helpless expression on her face. “Rick, he went back two or three more times, sitting there. One time he saw her drive in, the lights go on, nighttime, late. But he couldn’t talk to her.”

  “No one will believe he did anything wrong, Aunt Marie,” Hank began.

  She shook her head vigorously. “But he’s afraid neighbors saw him, remember his plate number, remember his face maybe. If Marta was murdered, if you find out she was murdered, then the cops will come back.” She shuddered. “This time for him.”

  “But nothing happened.” I stared into her face.

  “The last time she came home with Karen, the niece, I guess. They drove in, and Karen spotted him sitting there. She kept staring at him. When they went into the house, she opened the front door and she ran out. I mean, she ran down the sidewalk. She was screaming and cursing. Waving her arms. Like a crazy person. He drove away.”

  Hank and I shared a quick look. Karen hadn’t mentioned any encounter with Tony, but she might have paid it no mind—perhaps forgot it. I’d have to question her about that.

  Her words finished, Aunt Marie sighed, settled into the sofa, her arms sagging by her side. It was as if she’d weathered some awful tempest and now, a surprised survivor, she had little energy to move. Her face
caved in, deep wrinkles around her mouth, her eyes wet. She was gazing at the redundant watercolors of Vietnam done by Phoung, a child’s delightful fantasy of a Vietnam she’d never seen. Aunt Marie’s eyes moved from one to the next—a bamboo sway bridge, a cluttered market square in Saigon, a towering banyan tree, and a yellow river surrounded by bamboo groves—and she started to cry.

  Hank moved next to her, wrapped his arms around her.

  “Thank you for telling me this,” I told her. “But please don’t worry about this. And tell your son it doesn’t matter. Nothing happened. He simply sat there.”

  “But something did happen,” she insisted, making eye contact. “The woman maybe was murdered.”

  “But not by your son,” I answered. “Or husband.”

  “Who will believe that?”

  “I do.”

  For the first time she showed a hint of a smile. “You do?” A tick in her voice.

  I nodded—and I did. I saw question in Hank’s eyes, but I smiled at Aunt Marie. “I do,” I repeated.

  She rose, bowed, and returned to the kitchen.

  Hank was watching me closely. “That was nice of you.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t believe Tony or Willie could kill Marta. They come from a family that’s seen too much grief from killing, no? What happened to his sister. The daughter. Other families in Saigon. I mean, it’s possible, but my gut says no.”

  Hank whistled softly. “But if Marta was murdered, the authorities”—a flash of a grin—“authorities other than you, of course—won’t be as understanding as you are.”

  “True. And that’s the problem. Tony put himself in harm’s way.” I glanced toward the kitchen. “But Aunt Marie and the family don’t need to know that part of the story yet.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t have to.”

  “That means I’d better identify a murderer soon.”

  Hank made a clicking sound and pointed a finger at me. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  I pointed back. “If I believe what epic tales you tell your grandmother, you are integral to the investigation.”

  The grin returned. “Perhaps I exaggerated my position a little.”

  “Really?”

  A sudden rush of voices in the kitchen, the slamming of a door, a yelled greeting, boisterous. The men of the family had returned home, followed quickly by Hank’s younger brother Vu and sister Phoung. Laughter, sputtering, the boy teasing his sister, but Hank’s father suddenly yelled at his fifteen-year-old son, who’d not finished an earlier task. The kitchen got quiet for a moment, then erupted as the boy sputtered an apology that his father talked over, his voice harsh and nasty.

  Hank caught me eye. “Christ, not now.”

  Sometimes, I knew, Tuan Nguyen came back from his factory job after stopping for a few beers and shots of whiskey at Meyers’ Tavern, two streets over. There were nights when Hank, sitting with me somewhere, answered his cell phone and then bounded out the door, rushing home to rescue his mother from his father’s angry and cruel hand.

  Grandma opened the door to the living room and called us to supper, her tiny old hand waving us in. As Hank and I walked into the room, his father was still berating his sheepish and moody son, but the man stopped talking. He dropped into a chair, fingers tapping the table. It was Hank’s grandfather who glared at me, ice in his eyes, as though I were the reason for the father-son spat. The old man, small and withered like a gnarled twig, sat in a chair, his arms folded. He called out his son’s name—“Tuan!”—and shook his head. As his eyes went from my face to his son’s, the expression communicated one thing—look who is violating our warm and loving Vietnamese kitchen. Our evening meal. The child of the dust from under a rock. But Grandma, watching the horrible tableau, began humming as she spooned rice batter into a skillet, a tune I did not recognize but was obviously some Vietnamese song they all knew. Cay Truc Xinh. She sang about a lovely girl who stood next to a lovely bamboo tree…so serene a snapshot.

  Her daughter smiled broadly.

  Hank heaved a sigh and muttered, “A hymn to beauty.” He went on, “I think that I will never see a poem as lovely as a…” He stopped when his father grunted at him. He whispered the last word: tree.

  Grandma stopped humming but she was smiling at Hank.

  The only one not happy was the grandfather.

  But unlike the grandfather, Hank’s father, Tuan, always distrustful of me, the visiting dust boy, had long ago made a separate peace in the household. Respecting his son’s delivery into American culture—just as he celebrated his daughter Phoung’s slavish imitation of Matisse—he acquiesced to the strange and serendipitous god that sent him into exile in America and then allowed someone of impure blood to break bread with him. Or, in this case, the cheerfully but ironically named Happy Pancake. What I knew might happen, of course, was that Tuan would initiate a conversation with me about his current hobby horse—the reinstituted trade relations between Vietnam and the United States—a diatribe that somehow blamed me for world events. I’d learned to keep my mouth shut.

  Tuan savored the incendiary headlines of the day, gleaned from the yellow pulp tabloid newspapers printed on the West Coast. He culled tidbits about restored relations with Communist Vietnam and the death of the old life.

  Now, occasionally hurling a sharp look at his younger son, he caught my eye. “Time magazine tells me that Vietnam is a favorite place of the wealthy American tourist these days. Cruises, tours.”

  I said nothing.

  “Dad…” Hank began.

  “Isn’t it funny how a Communist country, one that slaughtered nearly forty-thousand American soldiers, not to mention millions of their own people, tortured them, beat their children, can now become a…a popular resort…” He pounded his fist on the table.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “So we begin another Vietnamese-American Conflict. This time the bodies are the ghosts of those left behind, maybe unburied, during the first war. People who fell from helicopters, fleeing. Unavenged, their spirits trampled on by the feet of laughing, rich Americans.”

  “Some of them are Vietnamese returning home—or their children.” Hank spoke in an even voice, quiet.

  “I spit on them all.”

  “Now, now,” Grandma interjected.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “What do you think?” he finally spat out at me.

  A loaded question, for sure, because any answer I delivered would be twisted and mocked and derided. I was allowed to sit at the supper table, but there was a price I had to pay. Because, in effect, I was the nagging symbol of the bastardization of the homeland. I was the American metaphor that was paradoxically also the Vietnamese metaphor for failure. Both these metaphors—melded together—centered on a man who was determined to keep his mouth shut.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to answer, because Grandma delivered the first batch of crispy, savory Happy Pancakes to the table. The glorious banh xeo. A sizzling crepe, crisp and aromatic, filled with chunky pork, split shrimp, diced green onions, a generous handful of bean sprouts, all fried until the rice flour shell hardened into a saffron yellow, to be folded into fresh lettuce and basil and mint, then dipped into a savory fish sauce. Nuoc mam. Sloppy, chaotic, rich, but—happy. Hushed, expectant, we lifted our chopsticks, sipped from bowls of jasmine tea, bowed our heads over the sumptuous feast. Grandma kept replenishing the community dish on the table. The Happy Pancake—a peacemaker, that pancake, because we stopped fighting the war I was never a part of—and dug into the food. When we ate, we talked and laughed and slurped and whooped it up. Grandma winked at me, which Hank caught. He gave me the thumbs-up, as though he’d brokered my little entente.

  Afterwards, the men disappeared outside to smoke Marlboros, while Hank and I sipped hot jasmine tea.

  Hank belched, which made his mother frown.

&nbs
p; “In Arabian countries,” he explained, “a burp after a meal is a sign of satisfaction.”

  “Yeah,” said his little brother, “in some cultures it’s a sign of being a pig.”

  Hank laughed. “You hear that, Rick? Fifteen years old and a wisecracker.”

  “He’s had a good teacher.”

  His mother smiled. “All my children speak before thinking. That’s what comes of living in a world of twenty-four-hour cable and teachers who have tattoos on their arms.”

  “Mom,” Hank said, “that makes no sense. All you watch on TV is the Cooking Network.”

  “I watch nothing.” Aunt Marie was speaking for the first time. She seemed startled by her own words. She raised her hand to her white hair, then slid her hand over her jaw.

  “Why?” Hank asked.

  “America is a place that will always confuse me.”

  Her words served as a period to the meal because the women began clearing the dishes. Aunt Marie looked distracted and apologetic, as though she’d spoken out of turn. She picked up a greasy platter, but it almost slipped from her hands. She yelped, then smiled.

  Grandma wagged an amused finger at her. “Dear Marie, you lie to us. I’ve been to your home and we’ve watched the American soap operas all afternoon.” Grandma, tickled, leaned in and said something I didn’t catch.

  Aunt Marie nodded. “Watching those American women yell and scream and cry is like being hypnotized by a snake—as much as I try, I cannot turn away.”

  Hank guffawed in English, breaking the smooth Vietnamese rhythms. “Aunt Marie, you are something else.”

  She turned to him, puzzled. She started to say something but a staccato wah wah wha from a car horn made her jump.

  “My Vuong is here to take me home.”

  Aunt Marie looked into my face. “He will not come in.” Again the apologetic look. “He prefers…”

  Hank leaned into me. “He never does.”

  The horn blared again, the same three sounds, each one longer in length.

  I sat up. “I wonder if I could have a word with him?” I asked Aunt Marie.