Honor and Duty (12 page)

“Lissen, China. When the ball come in, don’t hit it with your face. Use the
hands.
Catch it like this, cradle it in, like it was a friend. See? Don’t be jukin’ your head back and forth. Hands up and
think
it in. Can’t catch
nuthin’
with your mouth.

“Hey! Don’t hold the bat like that! Hitchuself that ball! Lookit that pitcher! Give ’im the eye! No, man—he’s over
there!
”

“No, no. China. Momma says, don’t say ‘dat’ or ‘dem’ or ‘dese.’ Say it like this—see, move your lips: ‘that,’ ‘them.’ ”

I made a face. “I don’ talk like dat,” I said.

“Right, China—surely you don’t,” he said.

I would look at his face to figure out my mood. If men drew blades or dogs coupled, I’d study his face so I could set mine. Toos was always explaining things to me. He told me on the way out of the Strand Theater on Market that the movie we’d just seen,
Pinocchio
, was about me.

I didn’t get it. But I was a boy tied up in strings, trying to be real and to think at the same time. Toos saw that Tony Barraza, my Y coach, was Gepetto, an adoptive father trying to form new limbs for me through the human carpentry of iron bodybuilding. Toos was in the role of a blond fairy godmother in a pastel blue dress with a magic wand, giving me second chances from ages seven to fourteen.

When we were ten, I found Toos crying behind a wall on the Anza yard. The sight of tear tracks on his strong dark cheeks shot pains into my heart and guts and made me pant while standing still.

“Toos—what’s wrong?” My eyes got wet because his were.

“Nothin’. Double nothin’.” He wiped his face with his sleeves. “Nothin’. You hear? I
do not cry.
” He looked away.

“What?” I asked.

He was quiet for a spell, just breathing. “Your daddy gets killed in the war. You get another daddy. And then he leaves for good, wouldn’t mean
nuthin’
, right?”

Fathers. Big omen. “You don’ cry. You’re strong,” I said.

He nodded at me, hitting my little fist with his big one. “I’m a man and I do not cry,” he said, while I said, “You a man and you don’ cry,” and we repeated it until our eyes dried.

But something had happened. You can look at our classroom pictures, at Toussaint’s smile after fourth grade, and see it, that although the smile was real, it had been robbed of a parent—a loss that children cannot restore without great outside help. The whole question about Toos’s survival, and mine, was whether that help would come.

But he was always there for me. Toos even explained life to me. “Somethin’s wrong,” I whined, ripe with panic and rich with embarrassment. “My … thing. It—it gets …”

Toos looked confused until he saw where I was pointing. I was gesturing the way fishermen advertise the catch of a lifetime. Exaggeration began early for us.

“Aw, you’re gettin’ a big boner. Normal, man! Ain’t gonna kill ya.” He laughed. Then he frowned. “Leastways, don’ think so.”

“Hurts,” I said.

“Don’ give it no mind. It’ll check out after an hour or two. That’s how babies get made.”

I gave him my funniest look, which made him hit me so I’d change it. “How?” I asked.

“Haven’t figgered that. Somethin’ to do with the moon.”

“Oh, I know dat.” I used to sit next to Sippy Suds on the LaRues’ steps, next to Brooks Mortuary. Once he had babbled about women. “They’s like heaven,” he had breathed. “Oh, God, sweet
heaven!
” I knew that the goddess Gwan Yin lived in the night sky, in the celestial firmament, sitting on the moon and deciding who got boy babies. She had sent me into the Ting family. I wondered how Sippy knew this without Uncle Shim explaining it to him.

Toos and I had hidden inside a closet in the apartment, with Edna unaware that we had managed to enter through the unlocked back door. My heart slugged with fear. If she caught us…

We had entered the closet to tell each other a
mimi
, a secret. “You first,” I said under my breath. “What’s yo’ secret?”

“Nawww!” he whispered. “I figured the door.
You
go first.”

I hitched closer to him. We were wet with sweat from a day of running from the McAllister Car Barn to Sears, Roebuck on Geary, and back to Anza to shoot buckets. I had dribbled the ball a couple miles and played three-on-three, shooting fair and passing good.

“Go ahead!” Toos urged.

“I wanna go ta West Point,” I whispered, below the ears of
wupo
, ghosts. They were in the closet, in the dark, with us.

“Huh?” he said.

“Shh! Wanna go ta West Point. Be a paratroopa. Don’t tell
no one
.”
Ji hui.
The gods had to have heard that. Years from now, they might kill me as I came out of the airplane. I looked into the dark, seeing nothing. Edna’s long coat was in my face. Mothballs. Pitch-black.

“Dang, China,” he whispered. “That Army place?”

I nodded my head vigorously up and down in the dark. Toos and I had talked about being jump-booted paratroopers when we grew up, swaggering like big men down McAllister past Cutty’s Garage.

“That Army place?” he said, louder.

“Yeah! Shhh!” I whispered.

Toos turned the idea around. “Be a soldier,” he said.

I thought of Guan Yu. I nodded. Toussaint’s daddy had been a soldier, too.

“Huh,” he said.

“Good idea?” I whispered. Silence. “Good idea, Toos?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, China, sure,” he whispered lightly. He believed in ghosts, too.

“Don’ tell, cross heart.”

I heard his finger trace loudly, twice, across his old, tattered flannel shirt. “Your turn,” I said.

“China …”

“Yeah.”

“China …”

“Say it!” I hissed.

“Sshhhh!” he answered.

I giggled nervously.

“China. Don’ laugh, man. This is a
dream
.”

He cleared his throat, making a sound like a roaring Chinese dragon, and I flinched in the dark.

“I want to be a … docta.”

We laughed in a pure way that preceded the days when I associated laughter with madness. That was crazy—Toos being a doctor! We almost died, stuffing our fists into our mouths, biting them, writhing on the floor, kicking each other, drumming our feet, trying to be silent. We laughed so hard, so physically, in that tiny closet, that we wept. When tears came out of my eyes I got scared, fearing that laughing had busted something inside me, that I had used some muscles or feelings I wasn’t supposed to be messing with and the gods had punished me for the happiness. Later, when we crept out of the house and onto the street, our eyes still wet, we started laughing all over again, unable to stop until we hit each other. Never, ever, had I ever failed to laugh with him.

Toussaint and I had taken many steps in our youth. He had taught me the big ones. But he had not given me the little plastic cup. It was from his mother, on the day I gave her flowers. That had been last Saturday, a day before I had left for West Point.

Dear Abby had answered my letter with a form letter on flowers. Red roses meant love. I had walked to Podesta Baldocchi’s near Maiden Lane. I couldn’t afford their prices, but I couldn’t afford to not get the best, and wired red roses to Christine in Berkeley. I spent two hours writing, correcting, and restructuring the sentiment, the counter Uttered with my errors. So much rested on the choice of words. Cyrano and Li Po never worked harder. Forget Roxane, Juliet, Dulcinea, Scarlett, Hsi Shih of the Warring States, or Brigitte Bardot and France Nuyen. Christine would read this letter. With the right words, someday she might marry me.

The final product was replete with the fundamental truths of affection, brimming with honest good cheer to last a season, robust with hidden meanings, forthright in its identification of parties and purpose, and not overly verbose:

Mrs. LaRue looked at me for a moment. It had been three years.

“It’s me, Kai Ting,” I said.

“Oh, Lord, it’s
you!
All grown!” she cried, putting hands to her cheeks, then stepping onto the porch and opening her arms.

“Hi, Mrs. LaRue.” She was the only woman who hugged me, and now she did it with great purpose. I made myself relax and accepted her strong warmth, letting it take me, holding her, not breathing, weakened by the irrepressible surging of
gan ch’ing
, human emotion.

“What’s this ‘Mrs. LaRue’?” She separated herself from me. “Now, Kai Ting—
what
have I done to … to fall from your grace?”

“Momma,” I said. “How are you?”

“Fine! Just a touch of bursitis! I’m
so
happy you visited! Reminds me of the old times, when you and Toos were just little children.” She smoothed her hair, then her dress, a faded purple down-to-the-floor, probably a discard from one of the households she cleaned. It had an open collar with a missing button. Against her skin lay an old gold necklace with a cross centered on her throat. Her hair had gray, but her youthfully smooth and pretty face and her symmetrical frame had remained largely unchanged in the last decade. She had a tiny mole on her left eyelid, and I smiled when I saw it. “I’m a lot older, and my hair’s a mess.”

“You’re the prettiest lady in the ’hood, Momma.” I handed her the bouquet, called “Spring Glory.”

“Oh, Lord,” she breathed. “You are a
case.
Thank you, Kai,” she said, holding the flowers at different angles, smelling the yellow roses and the gardenias, the sprigs of green, smiling at them. “Sit, where everybody can see us.” Here, folks visited in the open air. It promoted neighborliness, allowed women to chat while watching their children, and supported accurate gossip.

Forties big-band music came winding out of her open door from the Emerson radio which Toos had bought her with his first paycheck from the now aged Petrini Plaza Market.

“Momma. Where’s Toussaint?”

“He’s at summer school in L.A. You’ve been gone—how long? Four years?”

“Three years, Momma,” I said.

“Three years, chile! Be sure you come back next week.”

My heart sank. Los Angeles! “Can’t, Momma. I’m leaving—I got into West Point. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Oh, Kai—that’s
fantastic
news! That was your
dream
, wasn’t it? Your daddy has to be so proud of you! You be sure to write Toos! After all these years … you best write letters.”

“Toos tell you that?” I asked laughing. “It was a secret.”

She smiled. “You told me, chile, all the time. You wait here.”

She left. Kids ran in the street, tossing balls and thumping bodies, occasionally pausing to check out the Chinese guy on the LaRue steps. One kid came up the steps, squinting at me.

“I ’member you. You Toos’s fren’.”

“Hi,” I said. “Denise’s brother, Alfred. You’re gettin’ big.”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “I am.” He rejoined his buddies, confirming his identification of me. Here, no bikes, trikes, or Flexis; lots of juice and spit while the winos worked their bags. School had been out for a week. Many others had gotten out much sooner.

“Bread from a cold toaster” was the way Reverend Jones said it. Some had moved out; some already had kids, some were pregnant; others were at Youth Authority or in jail. Many were sick with a host of addictions and health ailments abetted by local liquor stores. Willie Mack, the tough, tormenting bully of my early youth, had just up and disappeared, years before. A few, like Lucky and Maurice, who had always flirted with the wild side, had been buried in cold earth before I left. Years before, we had filled the street like a Lion’s Dance parade down Grant Avenue on Chinese New Year.

Two neighbors passed, and I called out, “Hi, Mrs. Green—hello, Mrs. Gibson!” They waved back hesitantly. I could see them saying, Is that the Chinese boy who used to live here?

This had been home—ninety proof whiskey, a hundred proof cement, and 10 percent the Lord Jesus, with the rest in the hands, or the paws, of the rats and the trash-can dogs.

The music stepped up. Momma sat next to me and handed me a newspaper-wrapped package, a gardenia in her hair. It smelled sweet. I kept looking at her. She had a large, rounded forehead that led smoothly into her strong, angular, smart, knowing nose.

It was a worn, green plastic cup—a cousin to the one that had become my personal cup when Toos and I were second-graders. That had been the beginning of my life, when Toussaint had brought me within the embrace of his mother and the sanctuary of their poor apartment with the sureness of a lifeguard throwing a rope.

“Toussaint’s daddy, John LaRue, was a man who shared his
water. You remember that, ’cause it’s the spirit of the good Lord Jesus, Kai,” she said, with bright eyes. “You take that with you to the Army. Give me comfort, thinkin’ on you drinkin’ from it.”

“Thank you, Momma,” I said, holding it in both hands. “I will never lose it.” I used to sit here at night, while Sippy slept next to me. I hadn’t seen him, and I didn’t see his signs on the steps.

“Where’s Sippy? And Mrs. Hall?” We never knew her true name. Toos called her that because she lived in the hallway.