Sightseeing (11 page)

The flame of the oil lantern gets smaller and smaller and soon it is merely a pinprick against the dark night.
It's my mother walking on water,
I think. It moves sideways now, moves along the bottom of the dark shadow across the bay, comes to a resting place.
It's my mother on an island with no name.

I walk toward the water, toward the flickering light. The flame is like an orange eye winking at me from across the divide. The sand is damp, soft as a slab of fresh clay, my feet sinking into its warmth as I walk.

When I come upon the water's edge, I realize there is still considerable distance between where I am standing and the light of Ma's lantern on the island across the bay. Perhaps the water is shallow enough to walk across, but I remember from swimming here yesterday that the bottom quickly falls away and that my mother is not a very strong swimmer.

And then I see it. I see a thin luminous line out of the corner of my eye. I see a thread running faintly across the bay. An opaque sandbar stretched between the islands like an exposed vein.

I walk toward the sandbar, across the beach, my eyes fixed on the flame. I see that the path is no more than a meter wide, a white trail running across the surface of the water. The black sky turns a deep indigo, night slowly relenting to day, and I can make out Ma's small shape sitting beside the flickering lantern. I'm walking onto the sandbar, warm waves licking up across my bare feet, out to watch the sun rise with Ma, and then to bring her back before the tide heaves, before the ocean rises, before this sand becomes the seafloor again.

The only thing I ever learned about wealth was Priscilla the Cambodian's beautiful teeth. All her teeth were lovely ingots, each one crowned in a cap of pure gold. When she smiled it sometimes looked like that little girl had swallowed the sun. Dong and I would often ask to look and Priscilla would open her mouth wide. We'd move in close, stare into its recesses until her jaw got sore. “You're rich,” Dong and I would say, and Priscilla the Cambodian would smile and giggle like we'd just told her she was beautiful.

Her father was a dentist. When things started looking bad in Cambodia, he hired somebody to smelt the family's gold. He put all that gold in Priscilla's mouth. And then they took him away. Priscilla remembered sitting on his dentist's chair in the empty hospital while bombs fell on Phnom Penh. Over the next three years, as Priscilla and her mother moved from camp to camp, she sometimes went for days without opening her mouth—her mother was afraid the guards might get ideas. She made Priscilla nibble on gruel and salted fish in the relative secrecy of the warehouse they shared with hundreds of
other refugees. “Awesome,” we'd say. “They should make a movie about your life, girlie.”

This was the summer Dong and I wasted in the empty community pool the development company never got around to finishing. Priscilla and her mother had recently arrived in Bangkok with two other Cambodian families. They all squatted in a tin shack compound by the train tracks bordering the development. Before we met Priscilla, Dong and I in our unflappable boredom would sometimes stand on the rails and throw rocks just to hear the satisfying clang on the Cambodians' corrugated roofs. Priscilla's short, flat-faced mother would run out and bark at us in a language we didn't understand, but it wasn't too hard to understand the rusted shovel she waved threateningly in our direction, so we'd run and laugh like delighted hyenas.

Mother said the refugees were a bad sign. “God's trying to tell us something,” she said. “God's probably saying, ‘Hey, sorry, but there won't be a health club or a community garden or a playground or a pool or any of those other things you suckers thought you were getting when you first came to the development. I'm gonna give you some Cambodian refugees instead. They're not as fun, but hey, life isn't a store, sometimes you don't get what you pay for.'” Father nodded and said refugees meant one thing and one thing only. It meant we'd be living in the middle of a slum soon. “Those fuckers move in packs,” he said. Their little refugee camp would get so big we'd probably start thinking we were refugees too.

By that time the prognosis was already bad. The factories had moved to the Philippines and Malaysia. Mother was reduced to sewing panty hose out of a Chinese woman's house. Father carried concrete beams at a construction site for minimum wage. Some of the families in the development had already moved on, leaving their pets and potted plants and empty duplexes behind. Early in the summer, Father and Mother tried to sell like the others. But the market had turned; it was already too late. When the development company realtor came to appraise, Father's face turned so pale I was afraid he'd pass out. “That's a goddamn crime,” Father said, after the realtor offered little more than half the duplex's original price. “No crime here,” the realtor replied, fingering the knot of his tie. “Just old-fashioned economics.” So Father said, “Get out of my house. Get out or I'm gonna show you something else that's old-fashioned.” But the realtor just kept smiling and said, “Fine. Suit yourself. Have fun living like savages.”

One April afternoon, Dong and I were breaking our asses attempting stupid bike tricks in the unfinished pool. I sat in the shallow end wiping a stain on my pants while Dong prepared to ride off the diving board. It was going to be a good trick, we thought. A girl-seducing trick. We were sure that once all the girls saw us soar off that diving board and land in the deep end they'd swoon, fall on their knees, and trip over each other in the hopes of doing some delightfully nasty dancing with us. Dong and I had decided that our access to dancing of any kind would not easily be granted on our good looks alone. For one,
we were both too dark. For another, my dogged asthma had earned me the moniker of Black Wheezy from the Thicknecks at school. And, for yet another, Dong was knock-kneed and kind of fat. The Thicknecks called him the Pregnant Duck. When girls were around, all they'd have to say was “Hey look, guys, there goes Black Wheezy and the Pregnant Duck” or “Quack-Quack! Hack-hack!” and suddenly it was like the word Handsome had just been emblazoned on their foreheads. Needless to say, this was not funny to us at all—not even a little bit—but apparently very funny to Dong's parents and my own, because they laughed so long and hard when we went crying to them that we believed we'd become the most psychotically depressed eleven-year-old boys in the history of the planet. So we needed a talent. Aerial acrobatics seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, none of our attempts thus far had been very acrobatic or even very aerial.

That afternoon, just as Dong got halfway down the diving board, Priscilla the Cambodian appeared poolside out of nowhere. “Wheeeeee!” she squealed like a happy little succubus. Dong hesitated, turned to look at Priscilla, lost crucial velocity, and tumbled off the edge of the diving board. It made a bad sound. It sounded like a dog getting hit by a car because even with all the bike's clanging and screeching I could still hear Dong yelp when he hit the pool's hard bottom. Priscilla pointed and laughed, and that's when I glimpsed her gold fangs glinting for the very first time.

“Refugee fuckass,” Dong muttered, getting up off the mildewed tiles. “What do you think you're doing?” He collected his bike, teetered on his feet. But Priscilla the Cambodian just laughed and laughed some more. “Hey,” I said, walking down toward Dong in the deep end. “The pool's ours. Get out of here.” She looked at me curiously. She was younger than us. She wore an old Kasikon Bank T-shirt that came down to her knees. Short black hair sprouted in matted tufts all over her head. And she had that mouthful of gold.

She stopped laughing, frowned, pointed an accusing finger at us both. “Leave my mother alone,” she said sternly in Thai, her tiny voice echoing around the pool. “No more rocks.” Dong and I exchanged glances. We didn't know she could speak Thai. We'd seen her around the housing development with the other Cambodians, but they'd always spoken to each other in that gibberish.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Dong said, rubbing his head with the heel of his palm.

“Don't lie,” she answered. I glimpsed her teeth again. I thought about pirates. “I'll kill you next time. I'm not kidding, guys.”

“Okay,” Dong said, shrugging, getting on his bike. He started riding in large swooping circles, the chain creaking noisily, the wheels singing beneath him. “Sure. Whatever, girlie.” She stared at us impassively, watched Dong gliding
along the bottom of the pool. “You speak pretty good Thai,” I said after a while. “What's your name?”

Dong shot me an incredulous look from his bike.

“Priscilla,” she said almost sheepishly, fingering the hem of her T-shirt.

“Some name for a refugee,” I replied, laughing. “That's not a Cambodian name. That's a farang name.”

She opened her mouth as if she might explain. But then she turned around and started walking away. “Just don't do it again,” she said as she went through the unpainted gate. “No more rocks. My mama doesn't like it.”

She'd been gone for all of ten minutes when Dong and I climbed up the pool ladder, fished the bike out, and started making our way toward the railroad tracks.

“Did you see her teeth?”

“Yeah,” Dong said. “She's a freak.”

A thin strand of smoke curled out of Priscilla's shack. Somebody was cooking inside. We stood on the railroad ties, grabbed a few choice rocks, felt their cold, lovely heft in our hands. “Bombs away,” Dong said, winking.

The first rock elicited no response. But as soon as the second one rang the corrugated roof, Priscilla emerged from the house like an angry little boar, fists at her sides, nostrils flared, bushwhacking her way through the knoll separating the train tracks from the Cambodians' shanty. I saw her contorted face, started laughing, started sprinting. But halfway back to the road, I noticed Dong wasn't running beside me.

I turned around. That tiny Cambodian girl had Dong pinned facedown to the railroad ties. She sat on his back while he bucked and thrashed beneath her like a rodeo horse. She yelled at him, pummeled the back of his head repeatedly with her hands. I thought about leaving him there. But then I remembered that the girl had said she was going to kill us, and I suddenly didn't know how serious Cambodians were when they said something like that, even if the Cambodian was just a little girl. She could've been Khmer Rouge—a term Mother and Father always mentioned in stern voices when they complained about the refugees—although I only understood at the time that Khmer Rouge was a bad thing like cancer was a bad thing. Khmer Rouge probably made you bald and pale and impossibly skinny, and Khmer Rouge probably made you cough up vile gray-green globs of shit like Uncle Sutichai when we visited him at the hospital every Sunday. If that little girl had Khmer Rouge, I certainly didn't want Dong to get it too.

Dong looked at me helplessly when I arrived. Priscilla had both his arms pinned to the earth with her feet. “Dude,” he pleaded. “Do something.”

“Say you're sorry!” Priscilla screamed. Dong grunted, struggled some more in vain. She didn't notice I was there. “Say you're sorry!” she screamed again, hitting Dong's head a few more times, the sound flat and dull.

I touched her shoulder. Priscilla turned around and hit me so quick in the face that I fell back stunned. She got off Dong, leapt toward me like a little panther. She bared her
golden teeth and for a second I was afraid she might bite me. But she just started hitting my head with her palms. I raised my arms for protection, her blows short and stinging, but I also found myself laughing the whole time, taken aback by the intensity of the little girl's rage.

“Apologize!” she screamed again and again and again.

“Okay, okay,” I managed to say after a while. “Sorry. You win. Mercy already.”

“God, girlie,” Dong said, getting up, wiping the dirt from his pants with both hands. “Give peace a chance.”

She stopped. She looked at us both. “I told you I'd kill you,” she said proudly, crossing her arms. And then she reached out and punched Dong in the shoulder. “Fuck,” Dong said, flinching. “All right already. You know, it's a good thing you're a girl because—”

“You didn't say sorry,” she interrupted him sternly. Dong rubbed his shoulder with a hand. She raised her fists again.

“Okay,” he grunted. “Sorry. Happy now?”

“No,” she said. “Now I want you to say sorry to my mama.”

“No way,” I said.

“Fuck no,” said Dong, shaking his head, but Priscilla had already yelled something in Cambodian toward the shack and her mother was already walking slowly across the knoll, wiping her hands on a greasy apron.

Priscilla's mother was the shortest woman I'd ever seen, barely a head taller than us, with a face as flat as an omelet,
wide black unreflective eyes, and a man's broad shoulders. Her teeth weren't gold like her daughter's. They were just slightly crooked, a bit yellow, boring and regular. Priscilla said something else to her in Cambodian. Her mother nodded, scowling at us silently the whole time. “Say you're sorry,” Priscilla said in Thai.

Dong looked at me. I looked at Dong.

“Do it,” she said, her face creasing into a severe frown. “Or I'll beat you again.”

“Sorry,” we finally said in unison, staring at each other's feet. Priscilla's mother kept on scowling at us. I thought she'd start barking in Cambodian. I thought we might even discover what ungodly thing she'd meant to do with that rusted shovel. She'd probably bury us alive, I thought. I got ready to run. But instead Priscilla's mother just reached out and slapped us lightly on the back of our heads. And then, to our surprise, she smiled at us broadly—a genuine smile—before saying something to Priscilla. And then she walked back down to the shack.