All That Matters (28 page)

At the thought of that possibility—
thwack!
—I took a deep breath and lifted my skinny arms into the air. We both examined my arms: scratched and dirty, but not a single cut. Jack looked over the grimy front of my shirt. Nothing, except for a missing button just below the collar.

My legs began to shake.

“Wipe your face, Kiam. Use my sleeve.”

It just came upon me, the crying.

Jack handed me my mitt. We sat on the edge of the sidewalk. My shirt was a mess; my pants covered with dirt. We had only been fooling around, playing catch, lusting after shiny new bikes in Haskins’ window … I hurt all over, and Jack’s eye was swelling up.

Mario banged on the window and waved us to move on.

“You shouldn’t have been such a hero,” I said, limping slowly, feeling as if my groin were on fire. “Cripes, what were you going to do with that stupid baseball?”

Jack laughed. He had enjoyed the adventure.

“I’m going to have a shiner,” he said.

“Fuck you,” I said.

When I finally got home, I was the centre of shocked attention. But the Old One and Stepmother only shook their heads. Father would need to deal with First Son.

Poh-Poh wanted to knuckle me for my dirty clothes; instead, Stepmother went to the kitchen pantry and gave me some lotion for my bruised arm. “You tell Father what happened, Kiam-Kim,” Stepmother said.

I explained everything when Father returned home that night. Stepmother sent me up to bed. I thought I had gotten away easily.

“You die soon,” Poh-Poh said behind me as she guided me up the stairs. I flinched. The kick had left its mark.

It wasn’t until Jung-Sum came up and helped me pull off my dirt-encrusted pants that I felt lucky.

He said, “Dai-goh, there’s a big rip here,” and poked three fingers through the Irish tweed.

A few inches below the crotch of my baggy pants, he wiggled his fingers and laughed.

Then I remembered O’Connor had butted his way between the two bullies and had caused one of the guys to knock me sideways, full tilt. Reliving the pandemonium before that kick to my groin sent me sprawling, I felt, as in a nightmare, a glancing coldness along my thigh: it was the sliding chill of a steel blade.

I had some claim to toughness once word got out that the notorious Mafia Boys had picked on Jack and me and that we had lived to tell of our deadly encounter. My reputation only grew after one of them was arrested a week later and charged with the attempted murder of a rival gang member.

Jack sported his black eye proudly and retold the story of our death-defying escape more times than I could count. When he related details that were not exactly as I had remembered them, I nodded agreeably: Jack was the true hero as far as I was concerned. And he had the wounded baseball to prove to any skeptic how close I
—we
—had come to being knifed to death.

In all the telling, Jack never deserted the core of our friendship: he shared the glory with me. I had somehow slipped on my mitt, knocked my elbow against the knife and managed to save him, too. Not as
spectacularly, of course, but there was enough in his version to earn me a share of real respect.

In Poh-Poh’s version, told to Mrs. Lim and the mahjong ladies, stark references were made to every bruise that showed up on my legs and back, my arms and neck. Jung proudly included the detail of the razor-sharp blade that ripped through my trousers, nearly slicing off the family jewels. Each time he heard Jung’s version, Sekky grabbed himself at the crotch and fell down dead. Then I would pick him up and throw him in the air and bring him caterwauling back to life.

Liang was more interested in Jack’s black eye, since it ruined his good looks for weeks, and she wanted his cowboy handsomeness back. When his puffy eye got better and the blue-black stain disappeared, she got up her nerve to ask Jen to get her father’s boxy Kodak camera and take a shot of her beside Jack’s spotless good looks. Of course, I had to ask Jack if he would mind. He didn’t at all. He lifted Liang onto the porch rail and sat with his arm around her.

Jenny presented a framed copy of the picture to Liang on her tenth birthday. Jack even signed an extra copy for Jenny; he wrote, “Your hero,” and included a row of X’s, just as he had done on Liang’s copy.

Other pictures were taken that day. Jack and me with our arms around each other’s shoulders. “Forever pals,” we wrote on each other’s copy and signed our names. Liang took one of Jenny standing between the two of us. But she didn’t hold the camera steady, so the shot was blurred and half of Jack’s head was cut off.

Father spoke little about the Mafia Boys incident; he saw the whole episode as senseless. Third Uncle said that I was lucky that Jack was around that day. Stepmother didn’t think I should hang out with Jack so much, if only to appease Jack’s parents, who rightly thought that I was to blame for not watching where I was going. Stepmother reiterated that I spend more time with good Chinese sons.

Joe Sing, Jeff Eng, Fat Wah Duk, and I would hang around in the alleyway under the rows of bachelor-room rentals behind the Chinese school, just at the back of the W.K. Restaurant. Our favourite spot lay below half-opened windows, beneath the crisscrossing shadows of a plunging fire escape. We were pumped up that day, Joe and I shoving each other around, dragging on cigarettes from our communal package of Exports. We clamped the fags between our lips like Hollywood gangsters, while Jeff and Wah Duk tapped the latest beat on some garbage cans. We pretended we were in the Benny Goodman band.

The racket roused someone from a troubled sleep. A God-like voice boomed above us: “Shut the fuck up!”

We looked up at the strip of sky caught between the alleyway buildings. One floor above us, an angry face stuck out between swirls of stir-fry vapours hissing from restaurant vents. The whites of two dragon eyes nailed us to the ground. The thick hair protruded like horns. The dark-tanned face twisted with rage, spewing out ancestral curses in Chinese, in broken Italian, in what we eventually came to be told was fractured Hebrew and Hindu, punctuated with
some Indian phrases and highlighted with cries of
Goddamn! Damn! Damn!

Our hearts pounded.

Right above the iron cage of the swing-down fire escape, the words were coming out of the cursing mouth of Chinatown’s Number One black sheep. All of Chinatown knew that sneer, that angular face perpetually black eyed and bruised. Respectable mothers and fathers made sure we knew that the nineteen-year-old menace was the single most notorious demon in Chinatown history.

When the menace once staggered by us at Pender and Carrall, Grandmother sang out to him, “Drunk at noon, die soon.” And he turned his gaunt face, his thin lips contorting, and spat at her feet. Poh-Poh threw back some colourful curses, which made him shake with laughter; he tipped his hat to her, as if each of her curses were a blessing in disguise.

Jeff and Joe traded nervous glances, hoping the other might make the first move. But we were rooted by a deep and attractive dread: no one wanted to be the first to run. No one wanted to miss what would happen next. We swallowed the stale alleyway air, our lit Exports burning inert, stuck to our dry lips.

The dark head disappeared. Above the pounding of our hearts, we heard shuffling noises. Wah Duk and I chewed on our half-smoked butts; Jeff and Joe sucked away defiantly.
What next?

A door slammed. Before any of us could mount a four-way split, a body came vaulting down the echoing stairwell.

“Whadda we have here?”

The voice caught us off guard: it was breathless, but calm. The quiet before the kill. The menace tilted forward from the third step and jammed his fists against the lintil to tower over us, daring us to make the next move.

Those long legs could outrun a fox. His dark jacket was half hooked over bare muscled shoulders, his lean torso veined with sinew. I smelled a brute ready to pounce.

Jeff Eng gulped. My eyes widened. Joe Sing looked as if he could wet his pants. We tried to look away. It was no use. We were doomed. The killer finished buttoning his fly, then casually jumped the three steps and landed in front of us. The black leather jacket, a match for his pants, shifted like a cape.

Wah Duk took one step back, knocked against a half-empty garbage can. He stuttered the dreaded killer’s name: “F-f-frank Yuen.”

A clanging bell echoed in our heads.
Round one
.

Frank Yuen spat on my school bag, shoved Jeff, and snapped his fingers at Joe. Joe stumbled backwards.

“What have you boys got to say?”

He rested a hand on my shoulder and squeezed hard, enjoying the fear written over my face.

“S-s-sorry,” Jeff managed.

Frank smirked, taking time to study the four fledglings cringing before him. We could see the legendary scars on his chest. Jeff Eng let out his breath. Maybe Jeff knew as much as I did.

Frank’s oldest scars were from the belt beatings he received at the hand of Old Yuen. Frank’s mother had
tried to escape with her son three times, but Chinatown dictated that she should return.
Who will feed you and your boy?
Finally, unable to endure any more abuse, she left with Frank for good and did the most menial jobs to survive. She cleaned out the spittoons and bedpans in rooming hotels, cleaned up the rooms after bachelor-men had died there of old age or illness, until she herself died of TB, coughing blood until she choked to death. Then Frank’s father fell ill and became too weak to beat his son, and Frank moved back. At fifteen, Frank took charge of his father’s rent, his food, and medicine. The old man was still alive, and Frank was still taking care of him.

Father had sent me to collect the rent from Old Yuen a few times. I saw a man only ten years older than Father, a man too worn down to live but too stubborn to die. When I took the envelope of money Frank had left behind, I wondered why he did not walk out on Yuen, especially after all of his father’s abuse and the loss of his mother.

Father said to me, “Nothing to think about, Kiam-Kim. Frank is First Son, Only Son.”

Instead of defeating him, everything bad, even unlucky, just toughened up Frank Yuen. Grandmother told her mahjong ladies how she liked his tiger spirit. She called him “a good demon-boy.” Whenever Frank Yuen was sober, she would greet him with a grin; he would hold his palm out to her as if begging for coins. Once, she plunked down into his bandaged hand a bottle of her homemade cure-all lotion.

“For fast healing,” she said. “Not for drinking!”

Frank laughed, spun the slim bottle in the air.

“Yes, yes,” Poh-Poh shouted after him. “Shake before use!”

If he stumbled by in a drunken state, she would chant, “Frank Yuen die soon.”

But today, confronting us in the laneway, he was very much alive, albeit hung over, leaning against the brick wall, still trying to focus. Drunk, he would have been deadly.

“Get rid of those shitty-tasting butts,” he ordered. Four smokes hit the ground.

“Good going, men,” he said. “Always obey your superiors.”

Joe Sing snapped to. “Yes, sir!”

Frank laughed. It was a genuine, persuasive laugh.

The restaurant vents began to hiss again, sending out greasy aromas; someone above us was snoring, coughing; and in the fading light, shadows melted.

I stepped on the butt burning at my feet. Jeff stepped on his, too. For something to do. Frank watched us. He reached into his inside breast pocket. I expected to see the gleam of a switchblade, or even a handgun. But the face didn’t register any killer’s instinct. I stepped closer, just to look. We all did.

With a steady, practised hand, Frank slipped out a thick cigar. Then, as if he had considered everything about us, and liked whatever he had considered, he gave us a smile, his demon eyes suddenly human.

“Try this Cuban,” he said.

The voice sounded easygoing, an amiable spirit willing to take us in. Our anxiety almost vanished. We
had become an exclusive mob, a gathering, a club. We were desperate to be taken in. We looked at each other, our fears sinking away, our sense of adventure surging. Jeff Eng broke into his first smile. I relaxed, too. We all grinned. Frank Yuen didn’t seem so bad, up close, with his tousled hair. Fat Wah Duk had boasted before how Frank the Hood always tipped his mother well at their restaurant. Maybe there was a good Frank, a generous Frank, a kind Frank for mothers and boys. We let out a collective sigh.

Frank began to roll the thumb-thick cigar between his palms. It crinkled in its brown-and-gold wrapper. The warmth of his hands teased out the delicious aroma. He passed the six-inch Cuban under each of our noses.

“I’d like to try,” Joe Sing said.

“Yeah?” Frank said. “And you two punks?”

We nodded.

He tore off the paper ring with its embossed gold crest, slowly unwrapped the stogie like an elder unwrapping a rare ginseng root.

“Any objections to this torpedo?”

No one objected.

Frank licked the sides of the cigar until it gleamed, then bit off one end, spat it out, and smartly, struck a wooden match. Gently, puffing softly, easily, he lit the thing. The tip glowed, and a quarter inch of pure white ash curled into life.

I thought of the thick red candles Father lit before the gods in our family tong temple, the candles burning in the two Chinese theatres in Chinatown. How the candlelight glowed and the porcelain faces of the
Smiling Buddha, the Gods of Good Fortune and Luck, and the fierce God of Theatre flickered with life. In the growing alleyway darkness, our boyish faces gained new life.

Frank twirled the thick cigar in his manly fingers. He took one last drag. Phantom smoke hung above our heads. It smelled as sweet as the first taste of rum I ever had, just the few seconds before the alcohol burned up my insides and snapped off my head.

“Ready?”

We nodded.

“Take three deep breaths,” Frank said, handing the cigar first to Jeff, “then inhale deeply—one, two,
three
times
—without
exhaling. Hold the smoke in your guts as long as you can. Do it.”

Our fingers itched to take a turn.