Given World Page 2

  More people wander in—not regulars, tourists—trying, I would guess, to make some sense of this awkward and bewildering city they had surely envisioned differently. Maybe with real sidewalks, traffic signals that people actually abide, or white sand beaches and cabana boys, full-time electricity, food you can eat with impunity. I always say, Where the hell did they think they were going? But I didn’t have any idea either, so I guess that’s not entirely fair. I was, however, not expecting cabana boys or a Gray Line tour. I have been here six months now, and finally what is here is just what belongs. Meaning some part of me has acclimated, planted a little flag, and I can barely imagine—at least when I am awake—going back.

  Last week one of the kids, hunkered down on the floor at the shelter, paused while scooping rice from his bowl to his mouth and looked up at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “Where you town?”

  At first, I always said California, as that is the place they have all heard about, seen pictures of, imagine America to be, if they imagine America at all. I haven’t tried yet to explain Montana—the perpetual expanse and frigid beauty of it. “Sài Gòn,” I said. “Người Vietnam.”

  He looked back down at his bowl, dismissing me. “Nói dối.” Liar. He finished the rice, picked the last grains out of the bowl with fingers that seemed to move independently of the rest of him. “Người Canada.”

  “Nope.” I shake my head. Not Canadian.

  “Ở đâu, rồi?” Where, then? “Say true.”

  “Không biết.” I don’t know.

  “You crazy. Maybe American. American crazy. America number one.” He set his bowl down hard on the floor and left me then, without even a fleeting glance back, to wonder if I should even attempt to process either of his pronouncements, or any of mine.

  • • •

  Tonight my pool partner is Clive, of June’s, another ratty expat bar between here and the river, a few blocks away. He is another Brit, always barefoot, and, at fifty-something, fairly old as local gringos go. June is his Thai wife, a fading beauty, all business and hard as bone. Rumor has it that the taxi-girl trade at June’s is its main concern, not a sideline like it is here, and June the presumptive madam. Clive is also rumored to move a lot of drugs through the country by paying off the cops and the customs, and partnering with the right guys from Cholon, a less risky trade here so far than in Bangkok. Back in Manchester he worked the steel mills, and when they shut down went looking for something better than the dole.

  “Shite work,” he told me the first time we talked. “Bollocks and shite not having any.”

  “I imagine,” I said, though I couldn’t.

  “Bloke I knew in Thailand sent me a postcard. Said the birds were everywhere. And easy. And it was warm. They had this thing called a sun.”

  He found June in Chiang Mai, conducted a courtship of sorts, and married her in a little beachside ceremony.

  “Was she one of the easy ones?”

  He turned his head side to side two or three times, slowly, as far as it would go. “Nowt easy about her.”

  “So why’d you marry her?”

  He chalked up, bent down to take a couple of shots, and, after missing the last one, leaned back against the edge of the pool table, tossed his cue stick between his hands and looked up at the grotty ceiling. “The way she said no. Like she’d never been asked such a stupid question. I knew she was the girl for me.”

  “What was the question?”

  “I believe it was ‘Would you care to dance?’ ” He grasped the cue with both hands, waist-to-shoulder-width apart, and commenced a spin, his bare feet executing a remarkable pirouette.

  “Your shot,” he said when he stopped revolving. “Though ya don’t have one.”

  He was right. He’d snookered me good.

  Clive seems to like me, despite my refusal to snooker him or our opponents when I don’t have a shot. It drove him crazy for a while, but now I get a little grudging respect for trying to hit something of my own, no matter how hopeless it may look or how many rails I’ll need to carom perfectly off of to get there. We are a good team, in any event, and win far more often than we lose. The taxi girls root for us, applaud when we pull out a victory in the final lap.

  Tonight we are playing an American from Texas and a chubby Taiwanese businessman who are apparently involved in some sort of rare-monkey export concern that I don’t really care to think too much about. About what they do with the monkeys once they get them out of the country. The Chinese guy insists on yelping “Lucky!” every time I make a shot, no matter how simple or how complicated it might be, or how many shots I make in a row.

  The Texan responds each time with a lively, drawled “Damn straight, podner.”

  I would like more than anything to slap them both with one clean swipe.

  Clive knows I go off my game when I let myself get rattled by the opposition. He keeps reminding me to focus on the table. “He’s blinkered, mate. And that Texas twat is just trying to wind you up. Ignore them.”

  “I’m trying, but that is so fucking annoying. You notice they don’t do that to you.”

  “Cor,” he says, “Flippin’ gormless. Keep your pecker up.”

  “No pecker,” I say. “That’s the problem.” But I do get the gist.

  “Shoot,” Clive says. I make two respectably difficult ones and then miss a dead-easy four ball in the side. Clive says, “Quit pissing around.”

  “I made two.”

  “My two,” he says.

  Between shots, I lean sweaty and slick against the wall, and the temptation to unlock my knees, just give in and slide down to the floor, is almost overwhelming. In spite of the rain, it is at least ninety degrees in here, and the humidity might be even higher, if that’s even possible. I resist the inclination to perch on my haunches and instead focus on Clive’s feet as he pads around the table. No one has ever asked, at least within my earshot, why he never wears shoes, but I suspect it is because he can’t find any here that fit. His feet are not big, in the usual sense, but extremely wide. They look like hairless bear paws.

  In the end we win on an amazing cutback Clive slices into the corner. He misses scratching by a centimeter. “Brave,” I say.

  He pats me on the head. “No. Just good.”

  “Another?”

  “Not tonight, kiddo. I’m knackered. Going home to the missus.”

  “Sounds lovely.” He just smiles and shuffles out barefoot into the dark.

  It’s midnight, and the place is getting crowded, filling up with overflow from the Apocalypse. Phượng is delivering drinks, so there will be no window time before closing. Ian comes in, takes his usual place at a corner table, and nods at me. I nod back. I know I should get on my bicycle and go home, but the idea is too depressing. I don’t want to be lonely any night, but for some reason—maybe the twisted clarity of too many beers, or Phượng’s situation, or the music, or the rain, or my brother—I especially don’t want to be lonely this night. I wonder where James Taylor was when he wrote that song. Not Saigon, I bet. I bet it was someplace he knew and unquestionably belonged, and that he wasn’t even all that lonely.

  Phượng takes Ian his beer, and I watch as he puts his hands around her tiny waist and pulls her close for a quick kiss when no one else is looking. I don’t count. I am a collaborator. And all of a sudden I want what they have, even if I don’t get to know exactly what it is, or even if I’ve been telling myself for years there is no future in it. I suspect it is something along the lines of love.

  Phượng leaves for the bar and Ian waves me over to come sit with him. I am caught off guard by how grateful I feel but mostly am relieved to have at least a semilegitimate reason to stay awhile longer. On the way, I pick up a beer for him and a bottle of water for me. I already know I am going to feel like hell in the morning, but I don’t have to hammer in the last nail. Since tomorrow is Saturday, I have only one class—a sweet and ragtag band of earnest college students I will meet at the park in t
he afternoon—and then the eight-to-midnight shift at the shelter. I’ll survive.

  Ian takes note of the water, my unfocused eyes, and says, “How many?”

  “How many what?” I know what he’s asking but don’t want to admit to more than I have to right away.

  “Sandwiches.”

  “I was working on my second.”

  “Thought better of that?”

  “I did.”

  A Tiger sandwich is three beers: one Tiger beer between two other Tiger beers. Two or more sandwiches is tilt. Not pretty. He gives me a thumbs-up. Which is nice. We try to guess the tourists’ nationalities and watch them flirt with the taxi girls. Eventually I go home.

  Ian was one of the first people I met here, the night I found the Lotus, the first time I was brave enough to leave the one square block containing the eight-dollar-a-night hotel I stayed in for a few weeks after I landed. The block I had confined myself to, terrified of venturing any farther, of crossing the street. I had been in town only four days, but they had been long ones, spent mostly sleeping, dreaming of mountains and highways and home, fox dens and snow caves, waking to wonder what I had done. My room was enormous and timeworn; painted, with what looked like watercolor, a peeling and mottled blue: walls, floor, ceiling, doors, and window frames. The filmy curtains were also blue, and the holey mosquito net. It was like being underwater, and finally I had to get out, before I couldn’t anymore. In those four days I memorized the entry for “blue” in my dictionary. It said:

  of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day: the clear blue sky / blue jeans / deep blue eyes.

  (of a person’s skin) having or turning such a color, esp. with cold or breathing difficulties: The boy went blue, and I panicked.

  (of a bird or other animal) having blue markings: a blue jay.

  (of cats, foxes, or rabbits) having fur of a smoky gray color: the blue fox.

  (physics) denoting one of three colors of quark.

  It was Ian’s table that first Lotus night, and I watched him win for a long time before I had the nerve to put my name on the board. I was too unsteady to shoot well but made a few decent shots and earned myself a beer and some conversation, in English, which was a lot like being let out on my own recognizance. But after so much time and silence, it was hard to get used to talking again.

  He asked what part of Canada I was from. Later I would find out the locals did that to avoid insulting anyone by guessing they were American. At the time, though, I just said no part, but close.

  “Yank, then?”

  “Yank.” I laughed. I’d never been called one of those before.

  “What brings you to our fair city?”

  “Curiosity, I guess.”

  “You know about the cat, right?”

  “What cat?” He waited for me to figure it out, which took me longer than it should have. “Oh, the curious one.”

  “Right.”

  “I do. We have that cat in America too.”

  “Con mèo,” he said. My first Vietnamese lesson. I knew then that I could easily come to love a language in which the word for an animal was the sound it made.

  He asked me how long I planned to stay, and I said I didn’t know. My ticket was open-ended and my purpose was clear as mud.

  “Good luck with that,” he said, but not in a way that would make me feel ridiculous. More than, in some unnamable way, I already did.

  After a few months I constructed something of a purpose: living, getting from place to place, not crashing my bicycle, teaching idioms and street slang, feeding feral orphans. A few months more, and Saigon’s incessant din and treacly grime and sleepless lunacy have taken me over. The city carries me along like a wave. Or an avalanche.

  Which leaves little time to think about the reasons I came here: most of all to locate Mick, or his bones; or if not his actual bones, then his spirit, and anything else he could have left behind. Something I can see, or touch, or at least find a place in me that will accept this: MIA, after all these years, means gone, gone, gone, really gone. This will mean bucking up long enough to go to Củ Chi—so close it is practically a suburb—getting down on all fours and crawling into the tunnels where the army mislaid my brother.

  1. Hawks

  They say our early memories are really memories of what we think we remember—stories we tell ourselves—and as we grow older, we re-remember, and often get it wrong along the way. I’m willing to believe that, but I still trust some of my memories, the most vivid, like this one: there was a newspaper, and a headline, bigger than the everyday ones. It was morning and I was alone at the kitchen table, sleepy, my feet resting on the dog—he was a cow dog, speckled black and white, name of Cash—on the floor underneath. I had a spoon in my hand and was waving it around; drops of milk splashed on the paper.

  The headline said, “Johnson Doubles Draft to 35,000.” It was summer and I was nine. I knew who Johnson was. He was the president. He was tall and talked funny, and his nose took up half his face. The reason he got to be president was on account of the last one getting shot in Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald, who got shot by Jack Ruby, who did not get shot by anyone. JFK was the president when I first started school. John-John and Caroline were his kids and his wife looked like a movie star. When they buried him, she wore a black veil over her face so no one could see if she cried. John-John held her hand.

  President Johnson, in the paper, said Vietnam was a different kind of war. I knew I could ask Mick about that: about how many kinds of war there were, or how there could even be different kinds, but he was outside. My parents were out there too—Mom probably in the garden already, digging up potatoes before the sun got so high and hot it would turn them green, and Dad fixing fences or tractoring or scaring up dopey runaway calves. The usual. Our life.

  I collected the bowl of apples and the peeler Mom had left on the counter for me and went out to the front porch. I balanced the bowl on the railing and slid my feet between two spindles to stand on the bottom rail, so I could lean over and get a better look at my brother. Mick was crouched in the driveway next to a black Triumph motorcycle, his high school graduation present to himself. He was hoping to catch a girl with it, I knew, or to go away on it, or both. I was not in favor of either, but he was over the moon. The bike was magnificent.

  His toolbox lay open in the dust, and a greasy rag dangled like a cockeyed tail from the back pocket of his coveralls. Most of his blond hair was tucked up under a train engineer’s cap, but a few wayward strands crept down his neck and caught the poplar-filtered morning light like filaments of some shiny spun metal. No one else in the family had hair like that. Not even close. I thought about sneaking up behind him with a pair of scissors and snipping off a piece, but it seemed like a lot of work and probably not worth the repercussions. Instead, I looked around for something small to throw at him, as it was my habit to be annoying. I did know better than to hit him with an entire apple.

  Without looking at me, he said, “Don’t even think about it,” and gave one of the screws on the engine an infinitesimal turn.

  “I wasn’t thinking about anything,” I said. I was still searching, but there was nothing. I’m sure I sighed. I was a great sigher in those days. I picked up the bowl and sat down with my back to the wall, scissored my legs open, and set the bowl between them. The peeler was still on the porch railing.

  “Crap.”

  “What’s wrong? Can’t find a weapon?”

  “I left the peeler. It’s on the rail.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Get it for me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure, Cupcake.”

  I didn’t move. I sniffed the air and it smelled like cow farts. I said so.

  Mick said, “What smells like cow farts?”

  “The world.”

  “Probably not,” he said. “Probably just Montana.”

  “Oh.” I pondered my entire range of geogra
phic and zoologic knowledge, not coming up with a whole lot. “So, does that mean Africa smells like hippo farts?”

  “I doubt it. Hippos fart underwater.”

  “So what other animals are there?”

  “Anywhere? Or just in Africa?”

  “There. In Africa.”

  “You have an encyclopedia, Riley. Why don’t you look it up?”

  “I have to peel these.” I took an apple out of the bowl and balanced it on the top of my head. “Plus, it wouldn’t hurt you to just tell me.”

  I heard him sigh. I think he must have taught me how. “All right. Then will you be quiet?” No promises. I made a noise, like hrrmm.

  He pulled the rag out of his pocket, dipped it in a tin of rubbing compound, and began to buff a tiny scratch on the gas tank. “Elephants. Don’t even tell me if you didn’t know that already. Antelope, zebras, giraffes, wildebeests, warthogs . . .”

  “Warthogs?” I sat up straighter. “You made that up.”

  “No,” he said, “I did not.”

  I tilted my head forward to drop the apple into my hand, put it back in the bowl, and slitted my eyes like a snake. I considered my options. My tendency to doubt was well earned, but I still believed most of what Mick said, unless the bullshit was totally obvious. He was ridiculously smart. He read tons of books and remembered what was in them. Not like some people.

  “What do they look like?” I said, still not sure which way this was going to go.

  “Like bristly little pigs. Their tails stand straight up.”

  I was eyeing the peeler, and even went so far as to set the bowl next to me so I could get up to retrieve it.

  “What else?”

  Mick said, “I’ll draw you a picture later.”

  “When later?”

  “After now.”

  We were almost done. I could tell.

  “Where do these guys live?”

  “At the beach.”

  “The ocean?” To me, the ocean was the most magical place in the world, even though I’d never seen one, never been farther outside Montana than the North Dakota Badlands. But even the Badlands had once been underwater, or so I’d been told.