Dragon House (16 page)

Dao smiled, revealing pink gums and a few crooked teeth. “Are you staying dry?”

“Oh, it’s a warm rain, Dao. Nothing to be afraid of.”

He inhaled deeply. “It smells warm.”

Mai studied Dao’s leathery face. His body seemed thinner than usual, his legs reminding her of fence posts. “Are you getting enough to eat?” she asked.

“This old body doesn’t need much, Mai. All I do is sit.”

Minh glanced at Mai, remembering how Dao had saved them. She nodded and Minh carefully placed his Fanta and bag of potato chips on the ground in front of Dao.

“What’s that?” Dao asked.

“A treat for you,” Mai replied. “From Minh.”

“No, no. Minh, you take your treat back.”

Mai stood up, knowing that they had to leave or Dao would force them to take back their gift. “It’s right in front of you, Dao,” she said. “A bottle and a bag. Merry Christmas.”

As Dao continued to protest, Mai and Minh walked away. Soon the rain splattered on their backs. Mai led them into a park and moved beneath a massive banyan tree. The tree looked like a giant green insect that towered above them. They sat under a particularly dense section of branches, which protected them from most of the rain.

Minh sipped the Fanta and, smiling, handed the bottle to Mai. She tasted the sweetness, exhaling melodramatically. “I thought you might lose that game, Minh the Mighty.”

He nodded, pinning the bag of potato chips between his stump and his hip. He opened the bag with his good hand, took out a few chips, and gave the bag to Mai.

She ate a chip and handed the bottle back to him. “Dao was looking thin, wasn’t he?”

The bottle to his lips, Minh nodded.

“Too bad he can’t sell fans or play games,” she said, wondering what would happen to him.

Minh returned the bottle to his friend.

“Should we go to the train station?” she asked, eating another chip. “People will want to leave the city with this rain. You know foreigners. They have to always be doing something. They’ll be getting on a train and heading somewhere sunny.”

Minh let her know that he agreed. But he ate and drank slowly, as he was in no mood to leave the tree so soon. He’d never owned an umbrella, and the tree was like an infinite umbrella, protecting him from the elements. Beneath its canopy, he smiled, sipped more Fanta, and nibbled on a chip. For the moment his hunger had been suppressed, his fears scattered. He was just a boy sipping a sugary drink, happy to watch the rain fall into big brown puddles.

 

 

NOAH SAT IN THE KITCHEN, UNAWARE that he’d remained almost motionless for several hours. His whiskey bottle was nearby, next to the uneaten fruit that Thien had prepared for him much earlier. After e-mailing his mother, Noah had moved as far away from the women as possible. He didn’t want to hear them talk, or even laugh. Being reminded of happiness was something best left undone.

The whiskey-induced numbness that surrounded him was wearing off. He felt the edges of his emotions starting to sharpen. If it hadn’t been raining, he might have tried to spread more soil on the playground. He felt trapped inside, with two sets of such keen eyes on him. Iris had already checked on him twice. And Thien had popped into the kitchen to make a fresh batch of tea. Covered in white paint, she’d squeezed lemon juice and honey into boiling water. She had smiled at him before leaving, and he’d tried to hide his misery.

Noah was tempted to go outside but wasn’t sure how the rain would affect his prosthesis. It wasn’t hard to imagine the sleeve slipping on his thigh, further inflaming his stump. Though sometimes Noah sought out pain, today was not such a day. He felt inordinately tired and planned on closing his eyes and listening to the rain. A nap would help pass the time.

He reached for the bottle, intending to carry it to his cot. After taking a few unsteady steps, he heard someone descending the stairwell. Not wanting to meet anyone on the stairs, he leaned against the kitchen counter. Iris emerged, her clothes almost as paint covered as Thien’s.

“You’ve been in here all morning,” she said, her eyes not leaving his.

“So?”

“What are you doing here, Noah? Why did you come?”

He glanced outside. “I’m . . . I’m thinking about leaving.”

“And doing what?”

“I don’t know . . . really. Maybe just traveling . . . from place to place.”

Iris stepped toward him, for the first time frustrated by the inertia that seemed to grip him. She handed him a piece of folded paper. He opened the paper and saw that it bore Vietnamese writing. “These are places,” she said. “Two places not far from here. I want you to see them.”

“Why?”

“Please. Go find a cyclo driver, and show him this paper. He’ll take you.”

“Did Thien write this?”

Iris nodded. “I’ve been to these places, Noah,” she said, her voice softening. “They aren’t easy to see. But I think you should go.”

“What are they?”

“Would you please go for me?”

“For you?”

“For someone you used to love.”

He looked away. “That was a long time ago. I was a boy.”

“So?”

“So I’m different now. That boy . . . he’s gone. And I don’t believe what he believed.”

“Just go. Please do that for me. Go see what I saw.”

Noah started to respond and stopped. Iris found his eyes again, then turned and walked back up the stairwell. He glanced at the paper. Setting his bottle aside, he left the kitchen and moved through the center’s greeting room. A bucket near the doorway held several umbrellas, and he took a black one.

Outside, fat raindrops thumped against the fabric above him. He moved forward slowly, not wanting to slip. After a minute or two, he approached a busy street. Almost immediately a man stepped in his direction. “You want ride?”

Noah showed him the paper. “Here.”

“Fifteen thousand dong.”

The fare was about a dollar, and Noah nodded, following the man to his cyclo. The driver got on a small seat that rose directly over an old-fashioned bicycle wheel. In front of this seat was a padded cushion positioned above two wheels. Noah sat on the cushion, bending slightly as the man pulled a canopy over his head. Soon the driver was pedaling, steering his cyclo by moving a bar that was connected to the two wheels ahead of him.

The ride was surprisingly pleasant, and Noah watched the wet city pass. Many of the streets were covered ankle deep in water. Tarps fluttered over stalls. People hunched together beneath canopies and ate noodles. Young children pushed sticks along the water, pretending they were boats. Though scores of scooters darted about, there were fewer than usual.

The cyclo driver was talkative, telling Noah how he escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and fled to Vietnam. He’d been only sixteen at the time and had survived in the jungle for weeks by eating lizards, snails, and even worms. Initially, Noah wasn’t sure whether to believe the man, but the way he spoke about eating worms made his story convincing.

Soon they approached a city block that was surrounded by an imposing white wall. A sign on the wall read, WAR REMNANTS MUSEUM.

Noah turned to look at the driver. “This is what the note says?”

The man replied in Vietnamese, then added in English, “That what it say.”

After paying the cyclo driver, Noah turned around, wondering why Iris had sent him here. A ticket window was nearby, and he paid a nominal fee and was soon inside the complex. Almost immediately, he saw an impressive collection of Western war instruments. Several immense tanks were to his right. Ahead lay artillery pieces, a colossal seismic bomb, warplanes, and a helicopter. Everything was painted a jungle green, and most items bore a single white star.

Noah had seen such sights a thousand times and didn’t need to see them again. He headed toward a square, four-story building that was half white and half black. Inside were a handful of dripping tourists and Vietnamese. Surrounding them, display cases revealed hundreds of black-and-white photos, as well as handheld weapons. Noah moved toward the photos, his steps increasingly unsteady. The first pictures were of warfare—of battles and planes and annihilated forests. Noah saw images of North Vietnamese fighting the French, and then the Americans. He didn’t like such images, for they brought back too many memories. But the photos didn’t shake him either. He’d seen worse sights.

But then Noah rounded a corner and the pictures changed. His eyes welled immediately, and he had to steady himself. The images before him no longer told the stories of those who fought, but spoke about the victims of the war. He saw piles of lifeless villagers, shrapnel ridden children screaming as doctors pulled out pieces of steel, mothers wailing over dead sons and daughters. Next came photos of crippled survivors. Dozens of misshapen children, ruined forever by Agent Orange, stared blankly into the camera. A boy of three or four, his ears and nose missing from napalm, reached for his mother. Land mine victims too young to fight lay on bed after bed in a makeshift hospital. Everywhere a new horror seemed to confront Noah, an agonized face frozen forever in time.

He turned from the images, tears streaming down his cheeks. Shuffling forward, he tried to keep from shuddering. But his body didn’t respond to his thoughts. He managed to make it outside, into the rain. He hurried toward a distant corner of the museum grounds, collapsing against a wall. Though he closed his eyes, the sights of the screaming, ruined children wouldn’t leave him, reminding him of what he’d seen in Baghdad. He started to weep—an uncontrollable sobbing that seemed to turn him inside out.

Noah didn’t know enough about the Vietnam War to understand if it was wrong or right. But the photos tore at him. They blistered his soul. The rain mingled with his tears, thunder rumbling somewhere distant. He cursed miserably, haunted by what he’d seen. He thought about one photo he’d turned from—a little girl crying next to her mother’s bloody corpse—and suddenly found it hard to get enough air. He gasped, rose unsteadily, and left the grounds.

The same cyclo driver was waiting. Though Noah was tempted to return to the center and his bottle, he showed the paper again to the man. Before long they were drifting through the city, pelted by rain. Noah needed to see where Iris was leading him. He needed to understand.

Their cyclo left the wide streets and proceeded down a series of alleys. Modern-day Ho Chi Minh City disappeared. They rode into a shantytown. Tin rooms sprouted from either side of an alley that was nothing but a sea of mud. The man stopped pedaling. Noah handed him thirty thousand dong and lurched from his seat. The driver was still talking, but Noah wasn’t listening.

He moved into the depths of the slum. A part of the alley’s floor had been covered in boards, and people slept here, wrapped in old tarps. Noah saw children poking their heads out from within the tarps and he began to cry again. Moving carefully, so as not to step on anyone, he proceeded forward. The tin shanties—rusting and tied together with wire—seemed endless. The rain pounded against their roofs, the noise loud enough to hurt Noah’s ears. Many of the shanties had open doors, and he glanced inside the entryways, amazed to see families huddling together in closet-size spaces. Some of the families seemed happy—talking loudly or waving at him. But other doorways revealed the sick and crippled—men, women, and children too besieged by disease and misfortune to even note his passing. One woman had giant, ruptured boils on her face and arms—leprosy, perhaps. A few feet outside her doorway, a dead cat was being eaten by rats. Piles of trash rose along the edges of the alley, as if the residents tried to keep things as tidy as possible.

Noah kept walking, passing a skeleton of a man who was attempting to fix a scooter that looked beyond repair. After a few more steps, Noah came to a shanty that had only three walls. Inside, a woman squatted and sewed. Beside her, a young girl, maybe four or five, sat on a newspaper. She’d wrapped a cloth around a can and acted as if the can were a baby. When her eyes found Noah, she smiled. “Hewwo,” she said, waving.

He managed to wave but didn’t pause to talk, as she might have liked. He was suddenly consumed with the knowledge that the world would never know she existed, and that she seemed almost destined to a life of misery. She might be happy now, when she could entertain herself with an old rag and a can, but wouldn’t such happiness fade?

Thinking of what he’d seen in the alley, Noah knew that the little girl would never have a voice, would never be heard. He knew that she wouldn’t dream about birthday presents, warm beaches, or a beautiful wedding. She’d never know such things, never escape the cycle that she was born into. She’d only grow older, and whatever dreams she had would lose their luster. In time her dreams would evoke only bitterness, and within this bitterness she’d walk until she could walk no farther.

Noah’s prosthesis hit a slick, unseen object, and he fell awkwardly into the mud. He didn’t bother to get up but drew his knees to his chest and wept. He wept not for himself, but for those he’d seen who had no one to weep for them.

 

 

BEGGING HAD NOT GONE WELL FOR Qui and Tam. Qui had dragged her bench into Ben Thanh Market, and for the entire morning and early afternoon she’d sat next to a jewelry stall and tried to sell books. She’d sold only one and had given half of the profit to the nearby proprietor, who’d demanded a share of the sale. The rain was keeping tourists away, and Qui had repeatedly wished for the skies to clear.

Off and on throughout the day, when tourists weren’t in sight, Qui had shown Tam more pictures from the Thailand guidebook. Tam loved looking at the photos, searching for her mother among the many Thais. She didn’t remember the shape of her mother’s face but was certain she’d recognize her if given the chance.

Tam needed breaks from gazing at the photos, because her weariness was more pronounced than usual. She often lingered between consciousness and unconsciousness, a place where the aching of her bones seemed less overwhelming. She didn’t understand why she felt so tired today, or why her aches were so intense. Qui had said that the rain was dampening her bones, weighing her down. Tam wished it would stop raining. She didn’t like to hurt, to feel as if her elbows and knees were too sore to touch.