by Philip Huynh
One day, in the undying light of summer after eighth grade, the Moustache threw you his keys and said you were driving. You had never turned a wheel and were still more than two years away from being licence eligible. “Just down the street,” he said. “Easiest part of your day.”
He was right. Even though you were just going thirty clicks down a little Scottish-named street, you felt like you were flying. And this was how you learned to drive — in the tight alleys and double-parked streets of East Van, where there was nowhere to go but slow and straight. You were scared a cop would pull you over driving without a pass, but the homies told you not to sweat it. “You are invisible to them,” they said.
Now, in ninth grade, the Moustache threw you his keys every time you met him parked outside your school. They were right, the cops just drifted by so long as you could work the Datsun’s stick. And pretty soon you weren’t just driving straight lines from the school to the asphalt courts, but running errands. Pretty soon the Moustache wasn’t waiting for you at the parking lot after school but told you to meet him at some side street, a different one each time. Then he’d come and pick you up with Sang in the back seat of a strange, beat-up car. He’d throw you the keys, take shotgun, tell you to drive straight or make a turn, but would not say where you were going. You’d only know the destination when he told you to brake at some alleyway between two backyards. Then the Moustache and Sang took off down the alley while you sat in the car listening to the woodpeckers in the fruit trees, paying no mind to the neighbours who returned the favour and paid no mind to you. The Moustache and Sang would come back panting and load up the trunk, sometimes with electronics — TVs, VCRs, video game consoles — sometimes with canvas bags holding what you couldn’t tell. Then they told you to drive again — straight, left, right — to some strange corner, and then the Moustache would take back the keys and hand you some bus fare. The next time it was a different beat-up car. And then later you didn’t just get a bus ticket, but a fanning slice of fives and tens. “Candy cash,” said the Moustache. “Lollipop dough.”
It went down like this for every errand you ran, and you hid your growing stash at home in a Danish cookie tin. That’s where the money stayed, because you couldn’t imagine what you wanted to blow your wad on.
One day in tenth grade the Moustache picked you up right at the doorstep of your school, in another homie’s Supra. He had it newly waxed so you could see your teeth in its black coat. He wasn’t wearing his usual sorry tight jeans and scuffed sandals, but was in orange pants and black shirt buttoned to the collar with a sheen that matched the Supra’s paint job. He coasted down the Knight Street Bridge south to Richmond, then through dirt roads running along steep ditches on both sides, past the cranberry and blueberry fields of the Agricultural Land Reserve, which was for you the heart of darkness.
The Moustache slowed at a chicken-wire fence with plastic slats that concealed what lay behind, and an electronic gate opened at the sound of his cawing. You also heard a rooster, which surprised you because in cartoons they only crowed at sunrise. A winding paved driveway cut through verdant pastures to a freshly baked McMansion, with Doric columns and Pop-Tart stucco siding. A squadron of rice rockets were parked on the grass beside a red wooden barn, and the Supra joined them.
You followed the Moustache, stepping over glistening barbells left on the grass, then past a set of tires laid side by side like an obstacle course. Free-range hens scurried past you, which the Moustache said weren’t sold for money but instead kept for good fortune — not the same thing. He led you down the side of the McMansion, past the swivel glare of a CCTV camera, to the backyard the size of your neighbourhood park. All the homies were there, dressed up in celebration pastels. You could tell they were all in second-hands, with their pants a little too long or short, their done-up collars too tight or loose. Some wore varsity cardigans and ties with a fish-oil sheen loose around their necks. You felt analog and grainy in your torn jeans and scruffy T-shirt.
Not only were brothers in attendance but sisters as well. Two in bespoke skirts were clearing a long picnic table sloppy with metal parts you weren’t then familiar with — recoil springs and hammer pins laid bare like gizzards. The sisters put a cloth over the table and then set out paper plates. The scent of fish sauce and grilled meat mingled with that of fresh-cut grass and some sort of machine oil, and all of it made you sick-hungry.
The sisters eyed you like they just bit on a lemon, and the Moustache told them it was okay, you were his boy now.
“Isn’t that up to Brother Number 1?” they said.
The Moustache made the call to dinner, and you and your homies ate chastely at one end of the table, maybe because of the presence of the sisters eating at the other end. Sitting in the centre was a girl your age in a shimmering ao dai dress pinned with a corsage, her hair in an updo, and next to her was your boy Sang. This girl didn’t touch her food or speak to anyone, but looked up around her shoulders every so often like she had lost a dragonfly, while Sang smiled like he won the 6/49 by getting to pour her tea, his hand on the back of her chair.
This was how it went down — guys on one end, girls on the other — and you ate with your brothers in silent communion like this had always been so, until sunset, when some pineapple-shaped lanterns that had been strung on chicken wire were lit up. Then someone turned on the ghetto blaster. The sisters knocked off their slippers and danced to “Poison” by Bell Biv DeVoe. Then the mix took on a west coast edge with Tupac and Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, heating the waters just enough for the brothers to slide right in. Even the Moustache started kicking it. You stood up too, but drifted off to where the shadows of the apple trees grew long. Then, when Boyz II Men slowed things down, and hips on the dance floor stirred the Boyz’ soft crooning with the milk-light from the night sky, and the brothers were sweet-talking the sisters in ways you didn’t understand, all you could pay mind to was the girl in the corsage sitting by herself at the empty picnic table. The lantern shadows had carved a scowl across her cheek. Even Sang had left her side and put an arm around your neck.
“Fun?” he said.
“Mad fun,” you said.
In the days after, when you were back at school or running errands with Sang, it was like that whole night was just in your head. You had to ask what went down with all that.
“Brother Number 1’s birthday party,” said Sang. “Or was supposed to be.”
“The one who owns the joint?” you said. “I never saw him.”
“His daughter wanted it to be a surprise, but he didn’t show.”
“You mean the girl in the corsage?”
“Corsage?”
“Yeah, your girl at the table,” you said. “Your girl,” you said again, which made Sang’s teeth break out.
“Yeah, sure, my girl.”
You got your licence the next year. Now you could mule around good and proper. One day you skipped school as usual to drive Sang and the Moustache to one alley or another. You got in the driver’s seat, like always, and the Moustache took shotgun, but now there was another homie in the back, a sister that you could not place at first but whose eyes and pretty scowl rang a little gong. It was the scowl that brought you home again to that farm in Richmond. It was Brother Number 1’s daughter, except now she had filled out in all the woozy-making ways. She was curvy for a sister, and her long legs stilettoed from jean shorts across the back seat of the Datsun, in bare feet, and she wore a tight yellow Canucks shirt with the waffle crest ready to explode, leaving a bare midriff with a waistline that perfectly framed her navel. You didn’t even notice Sang in the corner, his Cheshire grin floating somewhere behind the girl’s bent kneecaps. She was reading some sort of textbook, head resting against the corner-pocket windows, those legs again now stretching over Sang’s lap.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” you said. Before you could offer your hand in respect, she gave you a once-over that kept it on the steering wheel.
“Just drive,” she said.
You did as you were told, then braked at an alley off Dumfries Street. The two got out and the girl stayed put, and from the way it was going down you knew better than to say a word. You stole snatches of her through the rear-view while she read her textbook, something about sociology or biology or some other -ology. The clock melted slowly and you started wondering if your brothers had pawned the sister off onto you. But when Sang and the Moustache came panting back with their canvas bags and you booked it right-left-right to the final drop, and your boys saw you off with fist bumps, bus fare, and another nice slice, you thought all was good and calm again.
The next time was just back to you three. The Moustache joked about how you all should get extra for babysitting Brother Number 1’s daughter, and hoped that you would not be called to such duty again.
But you were called again. She became part of the Routine, popping up in the back seat with some textbook and the scent of strawberries and rosewater. With her around, the Moustache kept his cigs in his pants and saved his patriotic anthems for the shower, while Sang sat in the back with his ass on his hands and grinning like no tomorrow.
Her English was better than yours, though she still had a trace of that accent no amount of time could wash away. Her name was My Linh.
“You think you’re babysitting me,” she told you once when you were alone in the car with her. “You’re wrong. I’m babysitting you.”
“Like on orders from Brother Number 1?” you said. She looked like you had cracked a bad joke.
“That’s what they call him. That’s not what I call him.”
“What do you call him?”
“Father when I need him. Nothing when I don’t.”
By next year you got tired of just being a driver, a babysitter, a mule. You gave the Moustache word that you wanted in on your homies’ core competencies. He said he would run it by Brother Number 1, and though the great man had never even seen your face, you knew your wish was granted when the Moustache handed you a sub sandwich with both hands like it was on a velvet pillow. At home, you bit in and spat out a Post-it Note that was wedged between two slices of cha lua ham.
It was a shopping list: tuct tape, bottles of fertilizer and pesticides by the litre, rolls of extension cords, PVC piping, black plastic pots, bags of soil. You went to the Canadian Tire for the materials in a Buffalo Bill minivan on loan, and dropped off the goods with the Moustache.
“What are we doing, planting a garden?” you said. “Do you need me for this?”
“You’re a Footman now,” said the Moustache, “and maybe someday you’ll be a Face.”
But all you did was run more pickups at the Canadian Tire. They still made you the mule. So next time you didn’t bother heeding the Moustache’s sub-sandwich call; you just stayed in your room, plugging out the sound of rain drooling down the drainpipes with your foam-puffed headphones. You didn’t notice the tap-slap against the windowpane, at least not until it was jimmied opened and you felt the raindrops against the back of your neck, like someone was licking you softly.
You looked up. It was My Linh, in a nylon windbreaker.
Her cheeks were red and puffy and streaked with rainwater or tears, you couldn’t tell. You didn’t ask her how she knew to get to your crib. She would tell you what she wanted you to know, no more, no less.
She took off her kicks, pulled down her hoodie, and beneath it her hair was slick and black like eels. She dried off with some paper towels. Then she shoved your Dead Kennedys tapes off the E.T. blanket and sat with her back against the rodeo wallpaper, her knees propped up against her chest. She put on your headphones and listened to a couple of tracks from your DK mix, classics like “Holiday in Cambodia” and “Kill the Poor,” then took the headphones off, looking like a tourist who had already seen this view. “Who’s he?” she said, pointing at the opposite wall.
“John Stockton,” you said. “Utah Jazz. Greatest point guard ever.” With anyone else you would have called them on their ignorance. With My Linh, you pointed out that Stockton was not as flashy as a dunker but he was a deeper watch.
“So John Stockton was a Footman and not a Face,” she said. “Is that what you want?”
Before you could answer, there was a knock, then your father opened the door. You sat completely still, as if you and My Linh would then turn invisible. He gave the girl a look over, said “Hello,” then gently closed the door.
“What does he do?” she asked. You couldn’t think fast enough to lie, but when you told her he was an electrician, her eyelashes flipped a switch. “You must know something about it too?”
You nodded, because as a kid you sometimes tagged along on one of his jobs, and whatever magic she saw in your dad you wanted a piece of it too.
Then you showed her the cookie tins under your bed, as if you needed her permission to keep them. She opened a lid and fingered the fat stacks, asked what you were going to do with them all. “Buy a Maserati,” you said, though you had never had that urge before this very moment.
“You’ll need more tins,” she said.
You heard a shuffling at the door. Left on the carpet outside were a plate of cookies and two glasses of milk. My Linh swished the milk, skipped the cookies, then disappeared back out into the rain.
The next morning at the breakfast table your father looked up from his fishing magazine and smiled at you like you had been long lost and finally found.
“It wasn’t like that,” you said. “It’s not like that at all.”
A few days later the Moustache gave you another gardening list. When you went to fetch the Buffalo Bill van, My Linh was waiting shotgun. You weren’t expecting her, and would have combed down your red hair instead of just putting a cap on. You rode to the Canadian Tire like newlyweds laying out your first crib, picking up some halide bulbs and steel cables before scoring the rest of the list at other hardware stores so as not to attract notice. Then she told you the straight-left-rights to your final destination. It was Sang’s house, except that the basement was bare now. Sang was standing in the backyard expecting you, though he didn’t make eye when you offered a fist bump. He was still a baby-faced shorty but now was thick in the arms and neck, and gelled his brush cut back to cover a little bald spot where he had once been scalped. The gel made him smell like an open bucket of gasoline.
You and Sang unloaded the day’s booty — the lengths of electrical coil and transformers, the vats of chemical fertilizer, the rolled-up sheets of poly. Each item in itself was innocuous, but the composite of your intent was clear. You worked in broad daylight because, according to My Linh, that way you wouldn’t be noticed. At night, if you made any noise or had the lights on, you’d be seen and known.
My Linh shooed Sang upstairs so that she and you could concentrate. In the basement, you stood beneath her as she went up a stepladder to cut a hole in the ceiling. You brushed plaster dust off your face then handed her the vent tubing, which she snaked through the hole. She got you to hang the zip lines and then the overhead lights. Then you watched her staple the poly sheets against the edge of the ceiling, how she arched her back like the Peking Circus to hammer the stapler above her head.
When she finished, she showed you where the concrete floor was cut to bypass the electrical meter. “That’s your job,” she said. She got you to move the transformers to a wooden shelf, then opened the electrical panel and waved her wrist like a game show hostess in front of the bus bars. “Work your magic,” she said. Your job was to divert power from its natural course, away from the stove, dryer, and refrigerator, to feed the lights that would feed the plants. Your magic trick was to turn Sang’s basement into a tropical hothouse.
“The homies who did this before fried themselves and one of our houses,” she said. “I have never seen my father so pissed.”
You took one of the wires and drew it over one of the bus bars. My Linh stood behind you and watched. You didn’t know how to make the right connections. All you could see was the tip of your nose, all you c
ould hear was your own hard breathing. You didn’t know if you had the right wires spec’d to do the job, but the wrong ones could get you fried, that much you knew. Your hand froze over the bus bar, unable to make contact.
My Linh took your hand in hers, then the wire. “I’ll do it,” she said.
You watched over her shoulder while she took out the breakers from the panel board, connected the white and yellow wires together into a funky spiderweb. You could feel the static from the hum of her fingers over the bus bars, the blood charging red in your face.
“You’ve done this before,” you said, and she told you to hush.
“Just watch,” she said. She flipped a switch and you heard a sizzle. All the appliances had been killed and you and she were now standing under the intense glow of the grow lights. Her smiling face shone white like an eggshell, and you felt like you were the chick beneath the heat lamp, ready to crack out.
“Now all we need for a grow op are the plants,” you said.
She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t even say the word,” she said. “You don’t see any plants. You just set up the houses.”
Sang came down with two plates of fried rice, one for My Linh and one for himself. “Gotta earn your keep,” he said.
“Take mine,” said My Linh, and handed you her plate and shared Sang’s plate and spoon. “Next time he will,” she told Sang.