Hearing himself say it as Matt leaned into his thigh.
“So everything’s fine until the surfer thinks how swell it would be to teach his son the grand passion at this spot he knows about.” Wil gulped the tea, its raw heat doing what he’d intended.
“Bad idea,” he said at length. “Very bad idea.”
Two coupled freight engines slipped past, the upline S.P. track showing green. In a bit they were lost from view and the signal had returned to red.
“I just thought you ought to hear it from me in case you get too trusting here. Know what I mean?”
Matt sighed audibly.
“So,” Wil added. “You ever eaten Vietnamese?”
3
Vinh Tien’s house was in the neighborhoods west of the airport and north of the freeway on a street needing a fresh cap of asphalt. Salmon-colored bougainvillea and purple lantana formed a low frontage while mini-lawn ran between clumps of Mexican sage, blue salvia, and ornamental garlic. Parked in the driveway was a white Toyota pickup with the Island Seafoods logo; in front, a ten-year-old red Honda Civic.
As Wil pulled in behind the Civic and got out with Matt, Vinh Tien met them in an open-collar shirt, gray slacks, polished slip-ons, sandalwood soap where the fish fragrance had been. The aroma of things cooking once they were inside.
“Sea bass,” he said, taking Wil’s jacket. “House specialty.”
Wil handed over two cans of Alpo. “These are for Matt. Would you have a back patio where he could keep us in sight?”
As he was explaining about Matt’s recent dislocation, Wil looked inside to see a woman in a Batik apron. Beside her stood a younger version, perhaps twenty-two: five-four, about an inch taller than her mother. Black hair cut short and swept boyishly around one ear, eyes more black walnut than almond, black jeans and DKNY sweatshirt.
Glass of white wine in her hand.
Reminding him both a little and too much of Lisa.
Vinh Tien said, “My wife, Li, my daughter, Mia. Mia is a physics major at the university.” Proud-sounding.
“Volleyball was mine, as I remember,” Wil lobbed at her, with a smile that went unreturned.
Li Tien said, “We are most glad for your presence. In this house you are welcome.”
“Very, mom,” Mia Tien corrected her. “We’re very glad.”
“You have a fine home,” Wil said in remembered Vietnamese, shaking hands in turn, aware of Vinh Tien’s glare at his daughter. Of how easily the picked-up phrase had come to him over two-plus decades…a finch awaiting the opening of its cage.
Li Tien bowed, excused herself to her tasks, Vinh Tien following with the cans. Which allowed Wil to take in a table set for five, napkins matching Li Tien’s apron, sliding glass fronting a yard with a fish pond backed by tall bamboo. Inside, the decor was modest: embroideries of small birds, water buffalo on a table beside a couch, stylized painting of an eye framed by convergent gold rays.
Black eyes took his measure over a swallow of wine.
“Points made,” Mia Tien said. “With them, anyway.”
“But not with you?”
“Volleyball…” It hung there, a spikeball at the top of its arc.
“Kept me out of trouble for a semester.”
“But you were there…the war and all.”
“I was,” Wil said. “That okay with you?”
More wine, a flip of forelock. “If I had a say, which I don’t, here’s a clue: Hiring somebody like you is a waste of money. Dad’s the one who killed my brother. And while you’re at it, skip the far chair and place setting. Might get embarrassing if Jimmy showed up with seaweed all over him and found you in it.”
Vinh Tien reappeared with a ceramic bowl into which he’d spooned the Alpo, Matt looking first at Wil before pinning on the bowl and starting a wag that enveloped his whole frame.
***
Dinner was as fine as it was tense: pho soup with the long thin loaves Wil remembered from countless Vietnamese cafés, spring rolls, salad with chopped peanuts and hard-boiled egg, the sea bass served with rice and raw vegetables. And afterward, candied ginger and French roast brewed in the press Li Tien poured it from. They spoke of Wil’s two tours and Vinh Tien’s fishing-village life before the war, toasted the incongruity of violence in a country as beautiful as that, the Tiens desire to return one day.
Li Tien mostly deferred to her husband, while Mia Tien drank wine, said little, and ate with a fork.
“Daddy was boat people,” she interjected after one exchange. “Did he tell you that?”
“That will be enough wine, Mia,” her father said. “You have no studies?”
“Fall, winter, spring and summer.”
“I suggest you count your blessings.”
Wil swung a look outside, where a sundowner spilling from the canyons rustled the bamboo.
“Yes sir, Captain Vinh, sir.”
Mock salute accompanied by the tilt-clink of wine into her glass.
“I said that was enough, daughter,” Vinh Tien said, grabbing it, spilling it before she could retract the bottle.
Jumping up so it didn’t get on her, she said, “You are pathetic, you know that? Isn’t losing Jimmy enough for you? How many does it take?”
Beyond the sliding glass, Matt’s ears had perked at the sharpness of their voices. By now Vinh Tien was on his feet and Mia was yanking open the front door, slamming it behind her. Wil heard the Civic’s engine wound tight, the screech of rubber as she roared away.
“I apologize for my daughter’s behavior,” Vinh Tien said, righting her chair as Li hurried dishes off the table. “She is too much her father’s daughter and this has been hard on her. She was fond of her brother.”
Wil noticed Matt still looking from face to face.
“So I gathered. What did she mean by what she said—’How many does it take?’”
Vinh Tien stood. “Bring your coffee and follow me,” he said, the phrasing vaguely like the echo of an old order.
***
It was more den than bedroom: wood-framed futon, walls showcasing Jimmy in boy-to-man stages. Cowboy hat and boots just after arriving in the states; hot wheels and in-lines; skateboards; even a surfboard. An intense kid who ceased smiling in the later photographs, donning Wayfarers and projecting model-like good looks, black hair worn almost to his shoulders.
Movie star potential.
Poker face revealing not so much as a card.
Yet despite these later poses, tennis clearly stoked the younger Jimmy. Singly, with his metal Wilson and trophies beside him as he knelt; paired with partners at the net; team portrait with the teenage Jimmy staring down the lens. Then there were the shots Wil pictured Vinh snapping from the stands: Jimmy lunging, punching a forehand volley, two-handing a baseline backhand. Hair flying at the point of impact.
“That’s how he got his nickname,” Vinh said. “He was always a fan of Jimmy Connors, that bad-boy thing, his speed and fight. Even before he met Connors once at a match, we were instructed to call him ‘Jimmy.’”
“And his given name?”
“Tuan,” Vinh Tien stated quietly. “After the uncle who raised me.” He produced a scrapbook, thumbed past yellowing tennis stories to a section in back, the clippings still new-looking. Thick black borders pasted in.
“This is for you to take,” Vinh Tien said. “It is every story about his disappearance that ran. Even the Los Angeles paper.”
Wil scanned headlines and subheads, including one detailing the findings of the official inquiry board: ACCIDENT RULED IN BOAT TRAGEDY. He sat forward on the futon-couch.
“When did Jimmy leave home?”
“Three years ago,” Vinh Tien answered. “We saw him not often after that. We did not communicate well.” As though suddenly out of steam, he pulled the folding chair from a small desk opposite and sat.
A thought stuck. “Was he working for you?”
“When he felt like it.”
“Doing what?”
Vinh Tie
n paused as if to measure his response. “My son liked diving. We sell sea urchin to the Japanese, though it has fallen off with their economy. The boat he took was the one we used for urchin, though not just that. We are not so big we can use a boat for one purpose. Our other boat is larger but older, with nets we—”
“What about the day he went out?”
Vinh Tien nodded. “A Sunday. We did not work that day.”
“Do you know why he went?”
“Not in all this time. I—” Hand to his temples as though trying to erase an image.
Wil flipped through pages for the time it bought. Pausing at one, he asked, “How far along was Jimmy’s girlfriend?”
Release of breath. “Wen? Seven months. It was not a topic we explored with him, if we wished to talk at all.”
“How long a trip is it out there—three hours?”
“We allow four. In good conditions.”
“Fairly arduous, is my point,” Wil said. “Even if conditions weren’t optimal.”
Vinh Tien looked at him.
Wil framed it for him. “With that weather even a possibility, is San Miguel a trip you’d make if Li were seven months pregnant?”
“It is not.” A shake of the head. “Not unless I had no choice. And if you’re wondering why Jimmy had the mother of his child with him, I do not know.”
“Would her parents?”
“Her mother…” Pause. “If she does, she has said nothing to us about it. But then, we were not on the best of terms with Nguyen Diem.”
Wil made a note of the name.
Vinh Tien said, “I have written down where you may contact her. As to your unspoken question, perhaps it was because my son and his girlfriend considered me a harsh and demanding parent, a throwback.”
Not seeing the man as using words to hear himself, Wil said, “You said harsh before demanding. Harsh in what way?”
Vinh Tien stared at the opposite wall as though a scene played behind it that excluded not only Wil, but anyone beyond another boat person. “In the way that life is harsh,” he began. “Bui Doi, they called us. The dust of life.”
4
Eight months after Saigon’s fall—after as many years of war as they, their parents, and grandparents had been alive—Li became pregnant with their first child. At first Vinh kept on with the farming and fishing that had sustained them through the recent fighting. Then he found work with a relative whose boat still functioned. Mostly they fished the old way, with line and hand net, selling to the new government for a fraction of what they had made before.
That was when the armed cadres began rounding up not only Vinh and most of his village for re-education, but thousands of peasants and city-dwellers who’d merely ridden out the war. This as the new government was turning what agricultural capability remained into hard-line collectives—rice going almost immediately to ration, inflation raging, people disappearing without trace.
For three years, Vinh saw home not at all and Li but once, when she came to visit him and he was able to sneak them to a wooded area for a few hours, Vinh remembering afterward her tears and little else. Certainly not the socialist dogma they were being force-fed like ducks for the table.
The final chapter was his conscription into the new Vietnamese infantry: Report at once to repel the Chinese, who in ‘78 had sliced open a front when the Viets intervened against Pol Pot’s killing fields. Two war having replaced the old one now, the north-based government only too willing to feed into the grinder anyone from the south. Especially its political recalcitrants.
Instead of reporting, Vinh slipped his column and went home. There he promised Li, two-year-old Jimmy, and newborn Mia that he’d send for them as soon as possible, next morning fighting his way aboard a patched-together hulk bound for Indonesia, so jammed with refugees they were unable to lie down except in shifts.
Barely at sea, troops intercepted them, stole their valuables and half their fuel, ordered them to turn back. Days later it was Thai pirates with M-16s, throwing overboard a man who defied them, spearing him with an oar until he sank in a trailing red cloud. Beating to death another man with their rifle butts, they stole the boat’s food and remaining fuel and raped the women, Vinh at least thankful he hadn’t brought his family with him.
Adrift, some became sufficiently crazed to drink seawater and died; others became so sick they couldn’t stand. Sharks took care of those who perished, and it was at that point Vinh knew he was going to die out there. All of them were. Then the island—tiny and deserted, but lined with coconut palms that, with the giant clams Vinh was able to harvest, kept them alive until another boat arrived and took them to a camp staffed by volunteers who ultimately helped Vinh find sponsorship. Relatives in California, the ones in Bakersfield, helped him get on with a small outfit working the Santa Barbara Channel.
“Three years later, I bought it,” Vinh said without emphasis. “By then I was able to sponsor my own family. And in the larger sense, I suppose the experience has affected my view of the world. It is a different generation, these children born to so much.”
Wil tapped the scrapbook, thought No shit.
“Why was this not the accident they said it was?”
“For one thing, there was no distress call—none.” Vinh Tien said. Second, the emergency homing device was missing from its rack. A freak wave, or so the Coast Guard thought.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
Vinh Tien’s eyes clouded. “My son knew the Channel, ask anyone. He was handling boats before he was fourteen.”
“Why would someone do him harm?”
“I don’t know why. I only know who.”
Wil could see him building to it, words to strike from the storm that was his expression. “You’re saying you know who’s responsible?”
The storm broke. “Someone without conscience who seduced my son with his lifestyle and his promises. A monster.”
“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.”
Looking at his hands as though wondering how they’d become curled into fists, Vinh Tien said, “The monster, Mr. Hardesty, is my brother.”
***
In the telling of it, Luc Tien was younger by two years and everything his older brother was not. The son of a different father, he was a thief almost from birth, stealing equally from those he knew and those he did not. Punishment simply left him unaffected. Leaving home on his thirteenth birthday, Luc entered the employ of a Saigon-based Chinese gangster who taught him numbers, extortion, hi-jacking, prostitution, the slavery and opium trades.
But it was the war that made him rich.
The war and its black market.
Luc Tien became known to American authorities, but not in a way that threatened to shut him down. He became a procurer, often selling the Americans’ own goods back at cheaper prices than the cost to manufacture and reship from the states. Consequently, he was buffered from prosecution not only by his own people, but by American supply sergeants, warrant officers, and G-12s skimming off the percentages he gladly paid.
Fat city, fat times.
The North Viets were a different breed. Targeted as one to make an example of once the city fell, Luc was dragged from the hold of a Manila-bound single-stacker, fingered for the reward by one of his own lieutenants. It took the better part of his fortune just to keep him from the firing squad, his very public apology quid pro quo in return for luring from the woodwork profiteers who paid the ultimate price for their trust in the new government’s pledge of similar treatment.
This before landing at the same re-education camp as his brother Vinh. Let alone aboard the same hellish refugee boat.
“Luc told the pirates about diamonds one of us was holding in return for some of the stones,” Vinh Tien went on. “The man they beat to death? Luc knew him.”
“What happened after that?”
“The others wanted to throw Luc overboard. I was forced to defend him, which…merde, what is the proper word?”
“Ostracized?�
��
“Yes—ostracized us both.”
“Until you provided them with food.”
Nod. “Still, it was touch and go, especially in the camps.”
“I can imagine,” Wil said. “Where does he live now?”
“On Mountain Drive. My whole home would fit into his garage.”
Wil pictured the area: Montecito, the L.A. side of Santa Barbara. Architectural Digest fantasies, thick-walled Mediterraneans and Spanish Colonial Revivals hunched behind equally thick walls. Town and Country photo spreads.
He said, “How does Luc make his money?”
Vinh Tien smiled sourly. “Perhaps I did not speak clearly. The way he’s always made it.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Am I not his brother?”
“Which means what at this point?”
“Which means nothing,” Vinh Tien said. “Less than nothing.”
Wil waited as the man drew a breath. “But you do see him.”
“No. But Jimmy did.”
***
According to Vinh Tien, Tuan “Jimmy” Tien always had an affinity for his free-living, free-spending uncle. Like a drunk to a morning eye-opener, Jimmy would gravitate to the wealthy enclave where Luc lived the life. There, Jimmy would ride the horses Luc kept for polo matches, storm dirt bikes through the chaparral behind Luc’s property, hone his game on the green hard-tru courts Luc invited local pros to practice on and kept immaculate.
“For you, Jimmy,” he made sure got back to Vinh and Li Tien in their tract home fifteen miles west and a star system away.
Then there was the swimming pool, the food, the parties and women—to whom Luc was more than willing to introduce Jimmy. Prostitutes, refugees working off a debt, China Whiteheads who waited only to trick so they could score—Jimmy had them in spades, his looks and athleticism making him popular not only with them but with Luc’s business associates. Viet-Chings, Vietnamese, Laotians, Chinese—Jimmy never knew for sure—people who knew a comer when they saw one. Maybe even Hollywood, they told him. Why, with their contacts…
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