Floodmarkers
Page 14
“Hi,” George said.
“Hey,” Huynh Tang said. His English was barely passable. “How are you?”
“OK. I’m working at Meats and Treats.”
“OK.”
“I have to say something.”
“No. You don’t have to say anything.”
“No, I do, though. I came here to see you, to let you know how sorry I am. I should have said that earlier. I just—”
“No,” Huynh Tang said. “I am sorry.”
“Come on,” George said.
“You know what my brother’s been saying.”
“What?”
“You’ve heard what my brother has been saying.”
“No.”
“I thought maybe you had. He has spoken to so many people, telling stories.”
“Are you talking about . . . who are you talking about?”
“My younger brother.”
George just looked at him.
“Our family believes in Caodism, George. Spirits. They talk to us.”
“How?”
“We use a special tool called Ouija board.”
“A Ouija board?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a fucking toy.”
“No. It is Caodist tradition. My brother has been talking very much to us.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“OK. I . . . haven’t heard this.”
“He’s been saying that you drove into him. He says maybe you were drunk. Wait. He does not say this to me. He only speaks to me about love. But he says this to our mother, and many people. This is what I am sorry for.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” George said.
“No, I know. That is why I am sorry. The dead cannot admit mistakes. I know he is making stories. I am just sorry that he will not stop. So many people speak to my brother.”
George looked at the neighbors gathered across the lawn. Had other people heard this?
“I gotta say, man. This just . . . this is just blowing my mind right now.”
They stood in silence for a moment, and then fireworks began to explode some miles away, shimmering blobs of white low on the horizon. It must have been another hurricane party, probably in Mankin Park.
“It’s a sign!” Manny yelled.
“Of what?” Kenny said.
“I don’t know! But follow me!”
Suddenly people were swarming around them, laughing, passing bottles, carrying them along. Manny was leading the party across the street to his house. George knew that Manny couldn’t stand spending time with Kenny—none of the neighbors could. This was a chance to move on.
At Manny’s, George and Huynh Tang went inside with the crowd. There were probably twenty people packed into the small, candlelit living room alone. People were drunk, loud, full on meat, totally uninhibited. Two girls from high school were licking each other’s faces. Huynh Tang began talking to their friend Bryce, who had gone completely bald since the last time George had seen him. A white pit bull was closed into the kitchen with a baby gate across the door. Manny was everywhere, giving high fives, screaming. People were holding hands, whispering in ears, and kissing.
This was when one fluorescent bar on the ceiling began to flicker to life, and George felt an improbable disappointment, the same as when one of Lystra’s ephemeral snowfalls melted in the morning sunlight. The electricity was back.
Manny rushed to a huge stereo-karaoke system in the corner and turned it on, knobs and meters glowing green against the brushed aluminum.
“Let’s Wang Chung!” he said.
Then he started fumbling through a shoebox of cassette tapes.
George made his way to Huynh Tang.
“Huynh Tang,” he said. “It was good to see you, but I’m gonna go.”
“Is there any message you would like for me to give to my brother?”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, but I just don’t believe in this stuff. At all. I need this to end.”
“Spirits never end.”
“I mean all of this. Do you even know what I’m talking about? I was really fucked up for a long time, man. I used to be a normal guy. I mean, I was shitting all over the place. Literally, like on my couch and stuff. I dropped out of college. I still can’t sleep. I can’t drive. I’m scared all the time. I wish it hadn’t happened. That’s about the most of it. I just wish I hadn’t been there. I wish I had never been there. I wish it was all, just—” he waved his hand in the air.
“I can tell him that,” Huynh Tang said.
“I don’t mean that I want you to tell him that. I’m just telling you.”
“He might have already heard.”
“Look. If you really want to tell him something, tell him that I wasn’t drunk. That I was just going home, man. I wasn’t doing anything.”
“OK.”
“I was just driving.”
“I know. I’ll tell him.”
“I mean, I wasn’t even driving fast. I was just driving. Tell him, I don’t know. I mean, look at me.”
Huynh Tang looked at him.
“What the fuck, man?” George said. “What do you see?”
Huynh Tang didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry,” George said. “I didn’t mean to raise my voice. You don’t deserve that. I’m just—”
Then rock music came on so loud that there was no chance of hearing anything over it. Huynh Tang motioned for George to follow him outside.
The storm had blown a strange layer of branches, party detritus from Kenny’s house, and neighborhood oddities across the ground. The streetlights were on now and illuminated a small toy shovel in the driveway. A pink blazer with its arms outstretched lay prostrate on a lawn. Loose paper shone like white holes in the ground. A cassette’s magnetic tape was unspooled, glittering across the tar fillings on the road. An alarm was sounding from someone’s house and George thought it was strange that anyone in that neighborhood would even have a house alarm.
“I want you to talk to him,” Huynh Tang said.
“No.”
“I live right there. Come on.”
“This isn’t my thing.”
“I’ll show you,” Huynh Tang said. “Come.”
Huynh Tang lived alone in a minuscule house just a few doors away. It consisted of two rooms, basically a storage shed with a bathroom.
Inside, the main room had several framed photos of him and his brother as children in Vietnam, holding machine guns in the jungle. The younger Huynh Tang was looking at George from so many different angles holding so many different guns. Huge guns. Smiling with belts of ammunition around his shoulders. He couldn’t have been more than eight in those photos.
All of the furniture was made from variations of plastic and particle board. George sat in one of the plastic chairs and it sagged beneath him as Huynh Tang set up his Ouija board. It was homemade, just blue magic marker on cardboard. Capital letters arced in two rows beneath a crescent moon and a sun. The moon had NO written on it and the sun read YES. At the bottom, the words GOOD BYE stretched the length of the board below a crude drawing of a flower growing out of a pyramid.
“So, you’ve never done this?” Huynh Tang asked.
“Only, like, playing.”
“This is not playing. Place your fingers here. Here,” Huynh Tang said.
George perched his meaty fingers atop an upturned shot glass with a map of Texas printed on the side. Huynh Tang’s fingers were on the opposite edge of the glass, the tips slightly touching George’s.
“Just barely,” Huynh Tang said.
The music from Manny’s house played tiny through the open windows. The house alarm continued sounding, and George could smell his own sweat. He was embarrassed, sitting there in silence at the Ouija board, touching Huynh Tang’s fingers.
Then the shot glass moved. Slightly.
I
The motion accelerated.
AMDEAD
The glass made a co
nstant scratching sound as it slid from letter to letter, and George felt his hand being led by a force that was not his own. It was terrifying but exhilarating.
BUTIKNOWWHATYOU
George wasn’t pushing it at all. He couldn’t believe this. The glass continued scratching.
DID
Adrenaline rushed through his system and he felt like his fingers might begin to shake. He tried to open his soul to anything. He was ready to allow the spirit in. Quicker now, the glass spelled out the rest, jerking from letter to letter.
YOUKILLEDMYBROTHER
Then Huynh Tang took his fingers off and the glass fell to its side.
“I don’t think we should go on,” Huynh Tang said. “It might just get worse.”
George was breathing in short gasps. Trying to take it in. You killed my brother. You killed my brother.
“Wait,” George said. “But he said, ‘You killed my brother.’”
“I told you.”
“No. But he said that I killed his brother. You see what I’m saying? That would mean you.”
George could almost see the English pronouns floating through Huynh Tang’s mind as he tried to sort out what had just been said.
“You were pushing it,” George said.
“No! This is a tradition.”
“I don’t give a shit what it is. You just spelled that out.”
Huynh Tang folded the board in half.
“If you don’t believe, then it will not work.”
“I believed it,” George said. “I did. But I know you just did that.”
“I don’t know why he said ‘my brother.’ How can I know?” Huynh Tang said. He held his open palms to the ceiling. “I don’t know what just happened. I don’t know why my brother is saying these things. I am sorry for what he says.”
“For what he says? That was you! What the fuck, man?”
“I just,” Huynh Tang said. His face had become swollen and his eyes began filling with water. He covered them with his small dark hands and said, “At home, everyone talks to spirits.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
George listened to the alarm for a few seconds and watched Huynh Tang hold his head.
“Hey,” George said. “OK. Forget about it. Let’s go back to Manny’s. What do you think? Let’s just leave this all right here.”
As George and Huynh Tang entered Manny’s living room, Manny was twisting his bony hips back and forth across the carpet. The music was louder than before and he was twisting low to the ground, his pointy knees at angles from his hips. Everyone was twisting with him, following his lead. Then he rose, still twisting, and so did everyone else.
A girl who had gone to high school with them, Mandy Phelps, put her hand out in a motion like you too. She grabbed Huynh Tang and pulled at him. He looked awkward but started to twist with her, her drink spilling onto his shirt.
It was the song “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” by the German rock band the Scorpions. George could tell that Manny had been waiting for this chance to sing a song about a hurricane during a hurricane. He held a microphone that was plugged into the stereo and sang into it as hard as he could.
“It’s early morning, the sun comes out!”
Mandy Phelps grabbed George now and he felt like he couldn’t just stand there, so he started twisting too. She drifted off, drunk, twisting and bumping into people until someone pushed her towards a corner, where she just twisted by herself.
Manny kept singing. “My cat is purring, and scratches my skin!”
Someone’s drink splashed onto the side of George’s face, and as the chorus started, people began to sing in unison with Manny.
“Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!”
Huynh Tang’s dark, wiry hair swung from side to side as he danced. His eyes were closed. He was not singing. He looked focused and removed and almost in a trance.
“Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!”
The second verse started, but Manny was the only one who knew these words. A man with no hair on top of his head but a ring of long hair around the sides that was tied into a short ponytail reached out and poked Huynh Tang in the stomach. His eyes opened and met George’s and they twisted in unison for a moment, until George cast his gaze downward. He twisted hard, throwing sweat from side to side. The chorus came around again and it seemed like everyone but George and Huynh Tang was singing. George didn’t want to sing if Huynh Tang wasn’t. He didn’t want to look like he was celebrating anything.
“Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!”
Then Manny was beside them and he pushed his microphone into Huynh Tang’s hand, motioning like come on! Huynh Tang awkwardly put it to his lips and said, “Hello?”
His voice blasted through the speakers.
Manny smiled and gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up. He was bringing the twist low now and people were getting down. Then he turned to George, smiling, and reached his arms around George and Huynh Tang, pulling them into a huddle. Manny smelled like smoked onions, and Huynh Tang had the microphone crammed into their faces. They were almost twisting on their knees now. George’s mouth wasn’t but an inch from Huynh Tang’s and he could feel Huynh Tang’s breath on his face, his lips, falling into his mouth. George was twisting in Manny and Huynh Tang’s arms, he was smelling Huynh Tang’s breath, he could feel Huynh Tang’s hair swinging into his eyes and across his face. His own arm was around Huynh Tang’s neck, and now Huynh Tang’s lips opened and so did George’s, they both sucked in air, and then it seemed like all of Lystra began to sing.
“Here I am!”
PHOTO BY TARIN RUBIN
NIC BROWN is a graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives with his wife and daughter in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Floodmarkers is his first book.
Copyright © 2009 by Nic Brown. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Trampoline” was published in Glimmer Train, “Steak” (under the name “The Neighbor’s Yard”) appeared in the South Carolina Review, “Libertee Meats” appeared in Epoch, and “Quickening” was published in the Harvard Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Nic, 1977-
Floodmarkers / Nic Brown.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43943-3
1. Hurricane Hugo, 1989—Fiction.
2. Community life—Fiction.
3. Life change events—Fiction.
4. North Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.R72242F’.6—dc22
2008051285
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