Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  “You beat your own wife, and you spy on her,” she says, now battering the man, her husband, with slaps. “You’re—”

  The man tries to push his wife away, but she hurls her body into his, and then they are on the ground, the woman on top of the man, slapping his head over and over again.

  “You’re scum, you’re scum,” the woman shrieks, and the sisters have no idea how to stop the violence that is unfolding before them, or whether they should try. They cannot even say whom they feel aligned with—the man, to whose presence they have grown attached, or the bruised woman, whose explosive anger toward the man appears warranted. They remember those punctuated moments of Chuck’s Donuts’ past, before the recession forced people into paralysis, when the dark energy of their city barreled into the fluorescent seating area. They remember the drive-by gang shootings, the homeless men lying in the alley in heroin-induced comas, the robberies of neighboring businesses, and even of Chuck’s Donuts once; they remember how, every now and then, they panicked that their mother wouldn’t make it home. They remember the underbelly of their glorious past.

  The man is now on top of the woman. He screams, “You’ve betrayed me.” He punches her face. The sisters shut their eyes and wish for the man to go away, and the woman, too. They wish this couple had never set foot in Chuck’s Donuts, and they keep their eyes closed, holding each other, until suddenly they hear a loud blow, then another, followed by a dull thud.

  Their eyes flick open to find their mother helping the woman sit upright. On the ground lies a cast-iron pan, the one that’s used when the rare customer orders an egg sandwich, and beside it, unconscious, the man, blood leaking from his head. Brushing hair out of the woman’s face, their mother consoles this stranger. Their mother and the woman remain like this for a moment, neither of them acknowledging the man on the ground.

  Still seated in the booth with Kayley clutching her, Tevy thinks about the signs, all the signs there have been not to trust this man. She looks down at the ground, at the blood seeping onto the floor, how the color almost matches the red laminate of the countertops. She wonders if the man, in the unconscious layers of his mind, still feels Chinese.

  Then Sothy asks the woman, “Are you okay?”

  But the woman, struggling to stand up, just looks at her husband.

  Again, Sothy asks, “Are you okay?”

  “Fuck,” the woman says, shaking her head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “It’s all right,” Sothy says, reaching to touch her, but the woman is already rushing out the door.

  Emotion drains out of Sothy’s face. She is stunned by this latest abandonment, speechless, and so is Tevy, but Kayley calls after the woman, yelling, even though it’s too late, “You can’t just leave!”

  And then Sothy bursts into laughter. She knows that this isn’t the appropriate response, that it will leave her daughters more disturbed, just as she knows that there are so many present liabilities—for instance, the fact that she has severely injured one of her own customers, and not even to protect her children from a vicious gangster. But she can’t stop laughing. She can’t stop thinking of the absurdity of this situation, how if she were in the woman’s shoes she also would have fled.

  Finally, Sothy calms herself. “Help me clean this up,” she says, facing her daughters, giving the slightest of nods toward the man on the ground, as though he were any other mess. “Customers can’t see blood so close to the donuts.”

  BOTH SOTHY AND TEVY AGREE that Kayley is too young to handle blood, so while her mother and sister prop the man up against his booth and begin cleaning the floors, Kayley calls 911 from behind the counter. She tells the operator that the man is unconscious, that he’s taken a hit to the head, and then recites the address of Chuck’s Donuts.

  “You’re very close to the hospital,” the operator responds. “Can’t you take him over yourself?”

  Kayley hangs up and says, “We should drive him to the hospital ourselves.” Then, watching her mother and sister, she asks, “Aren’t we supposed to not, you know, mess with a crime scene?”

  And Sothy answers sternly, “We didn’t kill him.”

  Balancing herself against the donut display case, Kayley watches her mother and sister mop the floor, the man’s blood dissolving into pink suds of soap and then into nothing. She thinks about her father. She wants to know whether he ever hit her mother, and if so, whether her mother ever hit him back, and whether that’s the reason her mother so naturally came to the woman’s defense. As Tevy wipes away the last trails of red, she, too, thinks of their father, but she recognizes that even if their father had been violent with their mother it wouldn’t answer, fully, any questions concerning her parents’ relationship. What concerns Tevy more is the validity of the idea that every Khmer woman—or just every woman—has to deal with someone like their father, and what the outcome is of this patient, or desperate, dealing. Can the very act of enduring result in wounds that bleed into a person’s thoughts, Tevy wonders, distorting how that person experiences the world? Only Sothy’s mind stays free of her daughters’ father. She considers instead the woman—whether her swollen eye and bruises will heal completely, whether she has anyone to care for her. Sothy pities the woman. Even though she’s afraid that the man will now sue her, that the police will not believe her side of the story, she feels grateful that she is not the woman. She understands, more than ever, how lucky she is to have rid her family of her ex-husband’s presence.

  Sothy drops her mop back into its yellow bucket. “Let’s take him to the hospital.”

  “Everything’s gonna be okay, right?” Kayley asks.

  And Tevy responds, “Well, we can’t just leave him here.”

  “Stop fighting and help me,” Sothy says, walking over to the man. She carefully lifts him up, then wraps his arm around her shoulders. Tevy and Kayley rush to the man’s other side and try to do the same.

  Outside, the streetlamp is still broken, but they have grown used to the darkness. Struggling to keep the man upright, they lock the door, roll down the steel shutters, whose existence they’d almost forgotten about, for once securing Chuck’s Donuts from the world. Then they drag the man’s heavy body toward their parked car. The man, barely conscious, begins to groan. The three women of Chuck’s Donuts have a variation of the same thought. This man, they realize, didn’t mean much at all to them, lent no greater significance to their pain. They can hardly believe they’ve wasted so much time wondering about him. Yes, they think, we know this man. We’ve carried him our whole lives.

  Superking Son Scores Again

  Superking Son was an artist lost in the politics of normal, assimilated life. Sure, his talents were often sidelined, as the store forced him to worry about importing enough spiky-looking fruits every month. (He recruited way too many of our Mings to carry through customs suitcases filled with jackfruit, bras padded with lychees, and panties stuffed with we-don’t-want-to-know.) Sure, he reeked of raw chicken, raw chicken feet, raw cow, raw cow tongue, raw fish, raw squid, raw crab, raw pig, raw pig intestine, and raw—like really raw—pig blood, all jellied, cubed, and stored in buckets before it was thrown into everyone’s noodle soup on Sunday mornings. When we walked into the barely air-conditioned store, we pinched our noses to stop from barfing all over aisle six, which would ruin the only aisle with American products, the one with Cokes and Red Bulls and ten-year-old Lunchables no one ate. (Though our Mas would’ve shoved their shopping carts right through our vomit, without blinking an eye, without even noticing their puking grandchildren—they’d seen much worse.) And, sure, Superking Son wasn’t nice. He could be cruel, incredibly so. Kevin won’t talk to him anymore, and Kevin was our best smasher last season.

  Still, even with this in mind (and up our nostrils), we idolized Superking Son. He was a regular Magic Johnson of badminton, if such a thing could exist; a legend, that is, for the young men of this Cambo hood (a niche fanbase, admittedly). The arcs of his lobs, the gentle drifts of his drops, and the li
nes of his smashes could be thought of, if rendered visible, as the very edge between known and unknown. He could smash a birdie so hard, make it fly so fast, we swore that when the birdie zipped by it shattered the force field suffocating us, the one composed of our parents’ unreasonable expectations, their paranoia that our world could crumble at a moment’s notice and send us back to where we started, starving and poor and subject to a genocidal dictator. Word has it that when Superking Son was young, he was an even better player, with a full head of hair.

  To us, Superking Son was our badminton coach, our shuttlecock king. That’s who he would always be. But what was he for everyone else? Well, it’s simple—he was the goddamn grocery-store boy.

  WE LOOKED TO SUPERKING SON for guidance—on how to deal with our semiracist teachers, who simultaneously thought we were enterprising hoodlums and math nerds that no speak Engrish right, on whether wearing tees big enough to cover our asses was as dope as we hoped. And every time we had exciting news, some game-changing gossip we heard from our Mas, like when Gong Sook went crazy from tending to his crop of reefer before he could sell even one bushel, we headed for Superking Grocery Store. So when Kyle informed us about the new transfer kid—Justin—whom he spotted smashing birdies and doing insane lunges across the court, being all Kobe Bryant at the local open gym, we dropped our skateboards and rushed to find Superking Son.

  We ran from our usual spot, the park where our peddling aunts never set up shop, the one next to the middle school that shut down from gang violence, and we ran because we couldn’t skate fast. (Our baggy shirts went down to our knees, compromising our mobility, but who cares about mobility when you look as fly as this?) It was February, and as chilly as a rainless California winter ever got, but we worked up a sweat doing all that running. By the time we found Superking Son in his back storeroom, we dripped beads of salty-ass water from head to toe. We were a crew of yellow-brown boys collapsed onto the floor, exhausted from excitement.

  Superking Son greeted us by raising his palm against our faces. “You fools need to shut the fuck up so I can concentrate,” he said, even though we hadn’t uttered a word. He was talking to Cha Quai Factory Son about how many Khmer donuts he wanted to order that week. Superking Son stared intently at a clipboard, as if peering into its soul, his constant pen-chewing the only sound we could hear.

  “Come on, man,” Cha Quai Factory Son said, “what’s taking you so long?” He grabbed the clipboard from Superking Son. “Just go with the usual! Why do this song and dance every week?” He pulled out his own unchewed pen, and then signed the invoice before anyone could whine about merchandising fraud. “Stop second-guessing yourself,” he added while shaking his head. “God, I’ve aged ten years waiting for you to make a decision.”

  “Stop giving me shit for being a good businessman,” Superking Son said.

  “This guy takes one econ class at comm and now he’s the CEO of Cambo grocery stores,” Cha Quai Factory Son teased, waving the clipboard around. “Like he’s Steve Jobs and those spoiled Chinese sausages are MacBook Airs.”

  Superking Son crossed his arms over that semipudgy chest—over that layer of fat that had grown at a steady rate since he took over the store. “All right,” he said, “everyone out of my storeroom. Y’all are sweaty as fuck and I don’t want this asswipe smell sticking to my inventory. I sell food people put in their mouths, damnit.”

  We urged our coach to wait, each of us frantic for approval. We raved about Justin, how he could replace Kevin as our team’s number one player, how Kyle swore he had served the best drop shots he had witnessed in the open gym all year.

  “The open gym at Delta College?” Superking Son said, sarcasm stretching his every syllable into one of those diphthongs we learned about in sophomore English. An entire Shakespearean monologue nestled in the gaps between his words. “That’s not saying much. At that open gym, I’ve seen players smack their doubles partners in the face with their rackets.”

  We only wanted to make the team better, so Superking Son’s reaction disheartened us. Yet it wasn’t different from what we had grown to expect from him. It wasn’t worse than that time a pregnant and morning-sick Ming was found vomiting into the frozen tuna bin, ruining a whole month’s worth of fishy profits, which inspired him to assign us two hundred burpees every day for a week. And it was nowhere close to that time his mom, while sweeping, slipped in the produce section and broke her hip, next to the bok choy, of all places. (We’re sure this was the moment he started balding. By his fifth medical payment, he looked like Bruce Willis in yellow-brownface.) We told ourselves Superking Son was simply stressed out. Everyone, including our own parents, relied on him to supply their food. He needed to restock his shelves for the upcoming month, or else mayhem would commence, we told ourselves, as if the store didn’t need to be restocked every month.

  “Bring the kid to conditioning, and we’ll see how quickly one of you bastards gets whacked in the head.” He stepped over our bodies, grabbed the door, and looked down on us. “I’m serious,” he said. “Get out or I’m locking you guys in here.” His biceps flexed, that small part of his arm begging to be bigger than it was.

  Cha Quai Factory Son started to leave first, but as he approached the door, he slid behind Superking Son. He massaged the shoulders of our coach, digging his big, dough-kneading hands into that perpetually tense and sore tissue. We watched as Superking Son’s eyebrows furrowed in revolt, even as his mouth was forming silent moans of pleasure. “It’s okay,” Cha Quai Factory Son said. “Let’s give this big boy his alone time so he can think about business.” Then he patted him on the stomach and jolted out the door.

  Superking Son reached out to grab Cha Quai Factory Son, almost falling over in the process. He missed, by more than he would ever admit. And as he leaned forward into the gaping hole of the doorway, watching his vendor flee from his grasp, we could tell he wanted to scream out some last remark. But he didn’t. He probably couldn’t decide on anything to say.

  THERE ARE STORIES OF SUPERKING SON you wouldn’t believe. Epic stories, stories that are downright implausible given the laws of physics, gravity, the limitations of the human body. There’s the one where Superking Son’s doubles partner sprained his ankle during the final match of sectionals. The kid dropped to the ground, right in the middle of the court, and Superking Son fended off the smashes of Edison’s two best varsity players by lunging over his partner’s injured body. He kept this up for ten minutes, until one of the Edison players also slipped and sprained his ankle, resulting in a historic win for our high school’s badminton team. (They later learned the floor had been polished by the janitors, who neglected to tell the badminton coaches. The guys who sprained their ankles sued the school, won a huge settlement, and now both have their own houses in Sacramento. Three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, everything you could possibly want.) Then there are the many times he’s beaten Cha Quai Factory Son in a singles match, often without letting him score a single point. Once, Superking Son bet Cha Quai Factory Son a hundred dollars he could beat him while eating a Big Mac, one hand gripped around his racket, the other around a juicy burger. Cha Quai Factory Son agreed, but wanted to triple the bet on the stipulation that Superking Son could not spill even a shred of lettuce. Halfway through, Superking Son had played so well, he got his friend to throw him another Big Mac, then a box of ten McNuggets. At the end of the match, the gym floor remained spotless. Cha Quai Factory Son refused to eat at McDonald’s for ten years.

  We didn’t believe the stories at first. We thought, Superking Son’s talking out of his ass. He wants to hype himself up to kids over a decade younger than him. That was why he allowed us to practice skating tricks in the parking lot and gave us free Gatorades (albeit the yellow flavor no one bought, never the light blue). Then, after we had entered high school, Superking Son took over as the coach of our badminton team. Just as he’d carried his own peers as a class-ditching player in the nineties, he coached our team through a regional championsh
ip. (There weren’t opportunities to compete at state or nationals, no D1 recruiters scouting matches with athletic scholarships in their ass pockets. This was badminton, for god’s sake.) Superking Son launched us to the very top of the Central Valley standings—the first time we called ourselves number one at anything. But more than that, from the little gestures—the fluid flair of his wrists when demonstrating how to hit, his ability to pick up birdies, with only his racket and foot, and send them flying across the gym to any player he chose, the way he tapped into rallies, making shots with his left hand so as not to annihilate the kid he was coaching—we had realized the stories were true.

  JUSTIN WAS NOT IMPRESSED. He was the new kid who showed up to school driving a baller Mustang, and parked it next to Kyle’s minivan, which was one of those beat-up machines abandoned at the local car shop and then flipped and sold to Cambo ladies like Kyle’s mom, who had prayed and prayed for the miraculous day their eldest children could start chauffeuring around their youngest. (We could tell, from the way Justin spiked his jet-black hair into pointy peaks, that he had the clearest intentions to paint red, yellow, and blue flames on the driver’s side of his Mustang.) So no, Justin was not impressed with the abandoned parking lots we hung out in, the mall that did so badly Old Navy closed down, the pop-up restaurants located in Cambo-rented apartments, where we slurped steaming cups of kuy teav in roach-infested kitchens, and he definitely did not see what we saw in Superking Son.

  But Justin, despite the pretensions, was a damn good badminton player. Plus, after school let out, he bought us rounds of dollar-menu chicken sandwiches, giving us rides in his Mustang while we inhaled that mystery meat. And we saw where he was coming from, because this year Superking Son was indeed off.

  Conditioning was a shitshow. Two weeks of Superking Son showing up late, his clothes stained with sweat (we hoped it was sweat), fish guts and pig intestines all stuck in his hair and stinking up the joint. Two weeks of him miscounting lunges and crunches and not stopping us from planking until we fell to the ground in pain—he was constantly checking his phone instead of keeping track of what we were doing. And he kept forgetting Kyle’s name. Kyle, whose dad visited Superking Grocery Store every week to buy lottery tickets and fish oil pills. (“Gotta be healthy for when I’m rich,” Kyle’s dad often said, kissing both his ticket and his pills for good luck.) Kyle, who Superking Son practically watched grow up, as his own Ma used to babysit Kyle when Kyle was still in diapers. (Babysitting, for her, entailed hours of pushing a naked infant in a shopping cart, up and down every aisle of the store.)