Читать книгу Dukkha Reverb - Loren W. Christensen - Страница 12
ОглавлениеUsually, I can do full splits, but two days of sitting has tightened my hamstrings and groin muscles so that I’m about a foot short of going all the way down. No problem, my muscles will loosen in a couple of days. I get to my feet and throw a few easy front kicks, some muay Thai roundhouses, and a dozen jab and cross punch combos.
Slept like a baby for eleven hours. The earplugs shut out any strange sounds and the mattress was sent from heaven. A couple of lizards parked on the ceiling above the bed worried me for maybe a minute before I drifted off to la-la land. They could have laid on my lips all night and I wouldn’t have known.
I drop down onto my back and rep out fifty jackknife sit-ups, fingers to toes as fast as I can do them. Okay, that’s enough. My body doesn’t feel quite right yet and my head feels as if it were full of oatmeal. Don’t want to burn up what little I got before the day even begins.
My cell rings.
“Reeves,” I say, my mind still in Portland.
“Reeves. Nguyen here.”
“Smart ass,” I laugh.
“I never understood that,” Mai says, with feigned confusion. “How can the word smart and ass be in the same sentence?”
“Well, an example might be, Mai Nguyen is very smart and has a great—”
“Okay, Sam. You woke up… feisty. Is that the right word?”
“Frisky. You would say ‘You woke up frisky.’”
“Thank you. You woke up frisky today. Do you want some croissant and fruit, and some coffee?”
“That sounds wonderful. I’ll be right over after I clean up.”
I take the fastest shower ever, get dressed, and I’m out the door six minutes later.
“Did you sleep well, Son?” Samuel asks. He and Mai are seated at the table. Ly sets down a plate of croissants and sliced papaya.
“I think he woke up frisky, Father,” Mai says.
He frowns. “Frisky?”
“I slept wonderfully,” I say, looking at Mai over the rim of my cup. “Gosh, this is really excellent coffee.”
“I am happy you like it,” she says, missing my not so subtle change of subject. “It is called Trung Nguyên. It is our, uh, domestic coffee.”
“It’s fantastic. Do you have Starbucks here?”
“No Starbucks,” Samuel says, thankfully forgetting the frisky comment. “I like their French Roast but nothing compares to Trung Nguyên. Many critics say it is the best in the world. Besides, a cup of coffee here is fifty cents. In America, a Starbucks costs four dollars or more. No Vietnamese here is going to pay that much for coffee.”
Mai refills my cup. “It is hot today already,” I say, appreciating the ceiling fan.
“Always warm in Vietnam,” Mai says. “This is the rainy season now. It will be hot and rainy and… muggy?”
Samuel nods. “Muggy, yes. You have not seen it rain until you see it rain here, Son. The streets flood for a couple of hours and then everything is dry and hot again.”
I stuff a piece of croissant into my mouth. “I’m so thrilled to be in Saigon.” I wave my hand at the table. “This is all really fantastic. The way you live. Everything. It’s not what I expected.”
Samuel’s face sobers. “We are very fortunate. As you will see, there is great poverty in Vietnam, especially in the countryside. In Saigon, it is not always as obvious, except for street beggars in the core area, and in a few scattered parts of the city. That is because we are the third wealthiest city in all of South East Asia. Others in Vietnam are not the same.”
“Father will not say much about it, but he and Mother give much to the poor and to organizations that help people. The old soldiers’ home cost much money to operate and Father pays for it himself.”
He waves her off. “That is fine, Mai. Everyone helps when they are able.”
“That is so not true. You and Mother are extremely generous—”
“Have some more papaya, Sam,” Samuel interrupts. “It is quite sweet this time of year. We have many types of fruit here…”
His predator eyes return.
Mai touches his arm. “Father? What…”
He turns toward the glass doors. Did he hear something?
The Superman overture tinkles from Samuel’s cell.
“Intruder,” he says, calmly looking at the screen. “In the yard.” He scoots his chair back and stands before the full meaning of his words sink into my still jet-lagged brain. He stands to one side of the glass doors and quick-peeks around its frame.
The Superman overture continues.
“Remain here,” he says, opening the glass doors.
Mai and I look at each other for a second before getting to our feet. We follow him like the disobedient children we are.
Samuel stops at the top of the landing and looks toward the koi pond, his head blocking my view of whatever he is seeing. From the left, Lam is sprinting toward the pond, shouting, his Glock held in a two-handed grip. He sounds pissed.
When I lean out to look around Samuel, I see the back of an elderly man sitting at the end of the cement bench where Samuel and I sat last evening. His posture is calm and relaxed. Incongruently, there is a groaning man lying on the ground next to him, kicking his bare feet and flailing his arms as if he were trying to swim on dry land. The old man is casually patting the back of the prone man’s head as if consoling him.
Lam stops behind the bench looking confused as to how to proceed. He says something to the old man. If he got an answer, I didn’t hear it.
Samuel moves quickly down the steps and over to his security man. Samuel says something to him and Lam lowers his weapon.
“What’s going on?” I whisper.
“I am not sure,” Mai says. “Lam asked Sifu if the man gave him trouble. I did not hear what he said.”
“That’s Shen Lang Rui?” I ask, though Mai just said it was. “Who’s the guy on the ground?”
Samuel speaks with the old man, who continues to pat the moaning man’s head. The downed guy is doing a great imitation of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps—sans pool.
“An intruder, I think,” Mai says. “I think Sifu caught him.
Slapslapslapslapslap
Tex streaks hand over hand between Mai and me, bounds down the four steps, and slaps his way over to the others.
Lam jerks the dazed young man to his feet, and is about to smack him, but Samuel steps between them. When Lam lets go, the intruder’s wobbly legs give out and he crumples back to the ground. The old man scoots off the bench, kneels on one knee, and touches the front of the man’s neck. He rubs it in small, gentle circles. In no time, the man shakes his head and gathers his bearings. Sifu stands and nods to Samuel.
“Shen Lang Rui healed him,” Mai whispers with admiration. “So he can stand.”
Before I can ask what she means, Samuel and Lam pull the man to his feet, his legs no longer appearing wobbly. Lam wants a piece of the guy so badly that he can barely restrain his twitchy self. I’m guessing that he doesn’t like his security breached. A touch on his shoulder from Samuel calms him a little.
Samuel leans in close to the intruder, their noses nearly touching. The young man listens, his face vibrating with fear, then he begins blabbering as if he has only seconds to get it out. Sifu has resumed sitting, his back to the action, once again watching the undulating movements of the koi.
I glance at Mai.
She smiles, shrugs. “All this must seem weird to you,” she says.
“It doesn’t to you?”
“The man is a thief, uh… what you call it… a burglar. Lam said that he came over the wall on the south side. There is a tree on the outside of it that Father is having removed because he thought that something like this could happen.”
“He isn’t one of Lai Van Tan’s people?”
“I think that Father is believing he is just a thief. He is nineteen, he said. Just a stupid boy. He is poor and was looking for something to take to sell.”
“Are you calling the police?”
Mai shakes her head. “I do not think Father will want that.”
“Why not?”
“Father will explain.”
“I don’t understand about Sifu. Did he catch the intruder?”
“I think so. I think he was holding the thief on the ground waiting for Lam to come. Sifu knew that Lam would see him on the monitors. He always teases Lam by coming in… un… undetected.”
I shake my head. “This is crazy. What was he doing to the kid’s neck?”
“The patting? It was to hold him down. Sorry, I do not know that nerve technique. It is advanced.”
This is all a bit much even if I weren’t still jet lagged.
Lam heads back to the monitor room, his gun tucked in his waistband, while Mai and I remain on the porch. Samuel is speaking quietly to the thief, but the hapless kid is trembling like a bumped bowl of Jell-O.
“Father is scaring him,” Mai says, “so that he tells other people never to come onto our property. Father says that the next time the old man won’t tease him with his kung fu, but he will send him to his ancestors.”
Samuel hands the sobbing would-be thief some paper money from his pocket, all the while the boy bows nonstop. Tex hands Samuel a rag from his pocket which Samuel secures over the boy’s eyes. A moment later, the two men escort him up the steps, past us, and through the glass door.
“Father gave him money to buy food, and now he takes him through the house and out the front gate. He did not want the boy to see the inside. Father is quite compassionate, no?”
“Has this happened before?”
“First time since we have been here. It is too easy with the tree.”
“Sam,” Samuel says coming back through the door and moving down the steps, as if the thing with the burglar was no more than a neighbor borrowing a cup of phở. “Sorry about the disruption to our breakfast. Let me introduce you.”
Sifu has remained seated on the cement bench, his back to us, elbows resting on his knees as he watches the koi. At least that’s what he appears to be doing. Judging by what Samuel and Mai have told me about him, he might be having a nice chat with the fish.
Samuel stops a respectful distance from the old man and murmurs softly. Sifu stands and turns about. I start to gasp, but manage to stop myself.
His eyes.
I read somewhere about a painting of Jesus in St. Catherine’s monastery in the middle of the Sinai Desert. The writer was startled by the painter’s depiction of Christ’s eyes, how they reflected two different expressions. The left eye conveyed Christ’s anger at sin and the right eye depicted his compassion and forgiveness. A monk told the writer to gaze at each eye for a while and reflect on what he felt from each one. The man did and was so moved that he left the monastery forever changed.
It would be strange enough that a Chinese man would have blue eyes or green ones, instead of the usual brown. But Sifu has one of each, one blue and one green. If the mixed colors weren’t peculiar enough, the way he looks at me is so… It’s as if he’s seeing into me, seeing into my… being. Like he already knows me, understands me. I want to break eye contact with him, but I can’t.
“Son, this is my sifu, Master Shen Lang Rui, founder of Temple of Ten Thousand Fists.”
Sifu brings his palms together below his chin in a praying hands gesture and bows his head. “Happy,” he says softly.
I return the salutation, feeling oafish. “Nice to meet you.”
The master is dressed in tan slacks, a pale blue overshirt and—blue Converse shoes. Samuel wears red ones. They shop together? He’s slight, maybe one hundred and fifty pounds, with a mop of healthy salt-and-pepper hair befitting of a much younger man. In fact, his posture, bearing, and his eyes—those eyes!—are of a man in his thirties, twenties even. Mai said once that he is in his mid or late sixties.
Just as I was wondering if I should offer my hand, he extends his, a surprisingly small one, fragile looking, like a dry fall leaf. He covers mine with his left one and moves it up and down slightly. “Happy,” he says again, just barely louder than a whisper.
I smile back and… I feel something—a surge of heat beginning at my hand and streaking up my arms, flushing my face, and flooding through my torso and legs. What the hell?
I relax my grip, but he holds onto my hand for a moment longer, his strange eyes interlocking with mine. Then he lets me go. I reflexively step back.
Samuel and his Sifu speak aside for a moment. Samuel nods respectfully.
“Sifu must leave now.”
“Oh?” I say, disappointed.
“He just stopped by to meet you. He has to go now to a dentist appointment. He has a toothache.”
Don’t know why that strikes me funny. I fight to keep it inside. “That’s terrible,” I say.
“It is okay,” Samuel assures me. “Sifu just needs a filling.”
I bite the inside of my cheek.
“See you,” Sifu says, running the two words together. Again he does the palm-to-palm thing.
He and Samuel head up the steps.
“He is amazing, is he not,” Mai says, gesturing for us to sit on the bench.
“I almost laughed about the dentist. A toothache just doesn’t fit a man like that.”
“Father does not think it is a bad tooth. Sifu sees a regular doctor. The master has not said anything, but Father thinks he might have health problems. It is something that Father senses about his teacher, I think. Maybe Father is per… perceiving something, I do not know. Father is worried, but he has not asked Sifu because he does not want to embarrass him.”
“I’m so sad to hear that,” I say.
“Yes.” Mai sits on the cement bench and gestures for me to do the same. We watch the koi for a moment, then, “Tell me, what did you feel when Sifu touched you?”
“I didn’t imagine that?” I ask, sitting next to her. The sun is getting hotter and the stirring breeze doesn’t help much.
“Did you feel warmness in your body?”
“It started in my hand and moved through me. What was it?”
“Chi. You know chi, right?”
“Of course. I understand the concept of chi as energy flow, life force, that sort of thing. Most demonstrations are fake, though.”
Mai nods. “Yes, I have seen false ones on YouTube. When you awoke today, how did you feel?”
“Pretty good. I was still fuzzy brained, though, from the jet lag.”
“Was?”
“Yes… Wait.”
“No more jet lag?
I rotate my head a little and look about. “You’re right. My head is clear; I feel sharp.” I look at her. “He did that? That’s crazy.”
“He helped you, right?” When I nod, Mai says, “Then maybe not crazy. Sifu does that with my family all the time. He feels something wrong and he tries to make it better. Most of the time you do not have to tell him that something bothers you. He will touch you and he will feel it.”
“Amazing,” I say, too dumfounded to say anything more intelligent.
Mai sobers. “But he has not been able to help my mother. TB is a very bad problem.”
“I’m so sorry, Mai.”
“Thank you.” We watch the koi for a few moments without speaking.
“You might have warned me about his eyes,” I say, smiling. “It took me back for a second or two.”
“Took you where?”
“It surprised me.”
“Oh,” she says. “Sorry. I forgot because I see him all my life. Father tell me a long time ago that there is a village in China where people have either blue eyes or green eyes. Some people say that a lost army, a Roman army, maybe two thousand years ago, be in this village. So some people now have blue or green eyes. Sifu got one each.” She laughs.
“Amazing. And the way he looked at me, into me.”
Mai nods. “It is exciting to see Sifu brings his chi to his martial arts skills.”
“I can’t wait.”
“You want to get some tea? We can walk down the street and get some at a sidewalk café. When we get back, I think Father wants to show you some more about our security. It will amaze you.”
“So far everything has. Will Samuel join us for tea?”
“No. He has office work to do.”
Mai and I go into the house to tell Ly that we’re going out. In the parking area, Tex is leaning on one hand and watering a large potted tree with a hose. He nods several times and wishes us a good day.
Mai pushes a buzzer on a concrete column and the double gate opens. It closes behind us with a heavy metallic sound similar to a jail cell door. “This way,” she says pointing to the left.
Samuel’s house is on a quiet, tree-lined street, quiet compared to the traffic anarchy I saw yesterday. There are not many pedestrians and just a few motorbikes passing each way. About fifty yards ahead I can see where this one feeds into a cross street and, judging by the mass of motorbikes and cars rushing past the opening, it looks like those insanely busy ones I saw yesterday.
Looking at me, Mai says, “Do not be obvious, but do you see that green building to the right across the street?”
“Yes,” I say, detecting it out of the corner of my eye.
“There is a man on the top floor. You cannot see him because he is back from the window, but he is one of our security people. We have another man who watches from a car in the alley behind the back wall. I think it was the man in the window who called Father when we were eating at the table.”
“Impressive. How do you feel about it, the security I mean? Do you feel safe?”
“Not until all this ends.” She points to a woman selling fruit near the corner. “We buy our fruit from Qui.” She smiles and nods at the old woman, who smiles back with bright red lips and teeth. The woman looks at me, laughs, and says something. Mai laughs heartily and waves goodbye.
“What was with her mouth,” I ask, when we’re a few feet away.
“Oh, you will see that many times. People, especially older women, chew betel nut. It is common here for hundreds of years. They get a little, uh, buzz?”
“Buzz? You mean like a drug high?”
“Yes, yes. Not too strong. But it stains the mouth.”
“Interesting,” I say, though I really mean weird.
“She say that you are a very handsome man and that you should be in Playgirl magazine.”
I sputter a laugh. “Playgirl? How does she know about that?”
“Popular here,” Mai giggles, bobbing her eyebrows.
What a day so far. I meet the most venerable Shen Lang Rui, who chi-zaps my jet lag away and now I’m walking with my Mai, talking about Playgirl, in Vietnam. It’s excellent except for one thing. After another unabashedly staring person passes us, I say, “I feel a little self-conscious.”
“It’s your size. Everyone looks because you are so big and you have the muscles.”
“Also because I’m so good looking?”
“Oh yes,” she says, banging me with her shoulder. Small pleasures. I’d like to hold her hand, but I’m guessing that would be a no-no.
“Sifu is an amazing person,” she says. “He is about the same age as Father, but our father sometimes thinks of him as his father. Also his brother and his best friend.”
“That’s wonderful. I still can’t believe that Samuel is sixty-five. If I didn’t know, I would have guessed a very fit man of fifty. But he moves better than most people in their twenties.”
“You will learn much from both of them. Okay, we turn left here. This street is much busier.”
Oh man, this is the bedlam I remember from yesterday. I barely hear Mai laugh over the roar of a million motorbikes.
“Sorry to laugh,” she shouts into my ear as we zig and zag around a mass of people on the sidewalk. “Every time I see this through your eyes it cracks me.”
“Cracks you?” I shout. “Oh, you mean, ‘cracks me up.’ Well, I think it’s sort of frightening.”
“Oh, there is Hung,” she says waving at a shirtless, elderly man squatting before a partly dissembled motorbike. He is smeared with grease from his bare feet to his concave chest to his matted hair. “He fixed my motorbike about two weeks ago. He is a very sweet man.” She waves as we approach. “Chào Hung.”
The old man looks up, his grease-covered face instantly brightening upon seeing Mai. “Mai!” he cries, as he struggles to stand. “Chào, chào, chào.”
Mai speaks warmly to him and gestures toward me. The old man nods several times as he presses his greasy palms together. When he smiles, I don’t see a single tooth.
“He says he is sorry, but he will not shake hands with you because he is so dirty. But he is happy to meet you.”
“Please tell him I am also happy to meet him.”
She tells him, and the man responds, then laughs with a cackle.
“Hung say to tell you that he is going to marry me. I am actually thinking about it because he fixed my motorbike very, very good.”
“Tell him that he is a wise man.”
“Thank you, Sam,” she says with phony sweetness. They converse for a moment longer before we nod our goodbyes.
“Sweet man,” she says as we proceed bobbing and weaving our way along the busy sidewalk. “He tell me before, that place on the sidewalk has been his bike shop for thirty years. He is ninety-two years old. No retirement here.”
“Incredible,” I say. “We got it so good in America.”
A motorbike jumps the curb five feet in front of us. We wait as the elderly woman driver jockeys her ride across the sidewalk and parks in front of a shop. She looks at me, smiles.
“Here is tea cafe,” Mai shouts, pointing to a storefront bearing an overhead sign: Café Eighty-Nine. “In Vietnam, many names of businesses are the same as their address.”
The sidewalk tables are occupied so we take one of two empty ones inside, ignoring all the blatant stares from other tea sippers. Happily, the traffic roar isn’t as overwhelming in here, so we don’t need to shout at one another.
Mai says something to a cute little girl who can’t be more than ten or twelve. The girl turns to me for a moment, her expression serious, then it transforms into a huge, brilliant smile.
“I ordered for you,” Mai says. “Green tea, of course.”
“Thanks.” The heat has flushed Mai’s face a little. Looks great. “So, good lookin’, is this our first date?”
She gives me that Las Vegas lights smile. “I think you are right.” She tilts her head down slightly and looks at me from under her eyelashes. “Do you want to touch me as much as I want to touch you?”
I love her straight forwardness. “More.” My face feels hot and this time it isn’t from Vietnam’s heat.
“Impossible,” she says, still doing that flirtatious head tilt thing.
Oh man, I must have done something right in a past life.
The young waitress sets down two small cups and a teapot, looking at me the entire time. When I wink at her, her face erupts into that huge smile again. She’s going to break a lot of young men’s hearts in ten years. She turns and walks away a few steps before looking back at me over her shoulder. She’s got the flirting down already.
“Thanks,” I say when Mai scoots my full cup over. “You must get looked at a lot. I’m almost six feet and you’re practically eye to eye with me.”
She shrugs. “I do. But I am used to it. Being tall bothered me when I was in my teens, but I do not care now.” She looks up at me from under her naturally long eyelashes. “Did I stare at you when we first met?”
“Oh man, you were shameless.”
She giggles. “Well, you were… what do you call it? Oh, yes, eyeballing me first.”
“No way.”
“You were,” she laughs. “I felt violated. That is the right word, right?”
“Yes, but you’re soooo wrong. Remember, for a couple of days I thought you were my sister.”
She shakes her head in mock disgust. “Then you were an eyeballing pervert.”
“Okay,” I bring my cup to sip, “maybe I’m guilty on both—”
I’m bumped from behind. My tea sloshes onto the table.
“So sorry,” a male voice says, with more laughter in it than apology. I twist around to see two men, mid twenties, both in blue jeans and tank tops, one red and one blue. They pass behind me and sit at the next table over, heads bobbing and smirking contemptuously. Two card-carrying assholes, my cop instincts tell me.
Mai leans toward them and speaks rapidly. Their eyes widen with surprise. They snicker and say something back.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
She turns away from them and says in a low voice, “I ask the one who bumped you if he did it on purpose. He said—”
“Ameri-can,” one of the men says in a tone that’s pure challenge. I pivot on my stool to look at them. “Ameri-can, right?” says the one in the blue tank top. He said it like, ‘You’re cow shit, right?’ The one in the red tank sucks deeply on a cigarette, his eyes laughing at me.
“I am.” I say to Blue Tank. I sip from my cup to show him how calm I am.
“I speak English,” he says. He sits straight, his hands fisted on his thighs, his elbows pointing outward as if he’s about to spring forward.
The young waitress approaches their table and Red Tank snaps at her, which sends her scurrying away looking as if she were about to cry. You can tell a lot about someone by how they treat servers, especially ten-year-old children.
“Your point?” I ask. He’s got a wispy little moustache. Nice effort but it’s not working for him.
Mai touches my hand. “Sam—”
Blue Tank says something to her, the words over enunciated, his eyes glaring.
“What’s going on? What did he say?”
“Exactly, Ameri-can,” Blue Tank says. “I live in Saigon and I speak Vietnamese and English. You come to Saigon and you don’t understand anything. You must ask the bitch.”
“Hey pal!” A surge of adrenaline washes through me.
Again, Mai leans forward in her chair toward the two punks, her beautiful face hard, her eyes flashing anger. She rips into them. When she finishes, the two men look at her, Blue Tank’s mouth hanging open, Red Tank’s cigarette frozen half way to his mouth. Blue Tank recovers first, points at her and sputters into laughter. He even holds his stomach. Red Tank’s cigarette finally makes it to his mouth, his eyes studying me as he sucks on it.
“You think you big man, eh?” Red Tank says.
