Читать книгу Fire Summer - Thuy Da Lam - Страница 11

THE WOMAN HITCHED the weight of the cripple up on her back. She moved slowly though he was only skin and bones. The straps of the red basket cut into her forearm, and the glass jars and bottles knocked against each other, sloshing water full of debris from the South China Sea.

I should throw them all away, she said to herself. What does it matter now?

His spirit seemed heavier than his ashes, which she had placed in a sealed jar before the failed escape. The nuns at Ox Pagoda had warned against crossing the ocean with human remains, but it was so her husband would have his kid brother with him. The woman continued down the sandy footpath with the spirit of her crippled brother-in-law on her back.

“Put me down,” he wheezed again.

“And leave you in the middle of the road?”

“You could have left me on the back beach with those chess players. They would have given me a drink.”

“Drink-drink-drink,” she scolded him. “Chết là phải!”

“Death is contentment.” His eyes closed halfway, his bony chin rode on her shoulder, and his shaved head bobbed as she plodded on. “I was contentedly dead before you brought me along in your jar.”

“You wanted to see America.”

“When I was alive!”

Her thin back curved under his weight, and his twisted feet dragged on the ground, but she kept treading as if they were still at sea. When the currents had returned her to the back beach of Vung Tau, she found her brother-in-law Hai washed ashore beside her. Without a word, she hoisted him onto her back, looped the handles of the basket of what remained around her arm, and trudged off over the sand where beachgoers lounged, oblivious under the sun.

“Steeped in moonshine, I was,” Hai croaked. “Now an anchovy in brine, a cup of rice wine would be fine, oh fine.”

“Have you seen a shuttle to Saigon?”

“Why don’t you leave me here?” He lifted his head. “Look, over there.”

In the distance, they could see a roadside café—a broken glass case of assorted cigarette cartons, beer cans, and Coca-Cola and Orange Cream bottles. A blue-and-yellow striped umbrella shaded a girl lazing in a hammock and two men sitting on low wooden stools.

The woman stopped to hike Hai up on her back. “Về nhà rồi tính.”

“Home?” He chuckled dryly. “By now our house’s been confiscated. You’d be thrown back in jail. No, no, no. A drink, I need a drink.”

When they neared the café, their nostrils were stung by smoke, gasoline, and gunpowder, and their throats tightened. They realized the two men were teenagers in scorched peasant rags. Hai’s knobby fingers dug into her collarbones. “Don’t stop. Walk faster.”

The woman lowered her head and moved as quickly as she could, the jars and bottles clinking loudly in her basket, water dripping.

“Set him down and rest,” one of the boys called in a northern voice.

The woman glanced up and saw eyes squinting at her from a burned face.

“Nhìn thấy hãi cơ?” the boy asked. His mouth opened wide and eyes squeezed shut as if laughing. “You look creepy, too.”

“Don’t listen,” Hai whispered. “You’re just a little green and bloated.”

She stopped before the two boys. “Does the bus to Saigon pass through here?”

“A jitney comes at nightfall,” the burned face replied. “We’re going to Ho Chi Minh City to catch the train north to be home for Tết.”

“Is it Tết already?”

“Four more days ’til the Year of the Rooster,” his friend said. He was missing a right arm and part of his upper torso.

“It’s February 1981!” Hai croaked, calculating aloud the number of days that they had been at sea. “Twenty in December . . . thirty-one in January . . . Fifty-one. We’ve been gone for almost two months!”

“Let him rest against here,” the boys said.

They lifted Hai off her back and propped him up amid a pile of dried coconut husks. The one with the hole in his chest lit a cigarette and tucked it between Hai’s parched lips. The burned face dug two paper coins from his ragged pants pocket, held them up to his squint, and offered to buy them drinks.

“How far did you get?” the vendor asked. Her thick make-up did not mask her swollen pale skin but made her appear like a character from a cải lương folk opera.

“Bidon Isle,” Hai said, his gnarled fingers clutching a Bia Saigon. “Everyone dove for it. My sister-in-law jumped in. People swam, swam, and swam.” He stopped mid-story. The xe lam arrived at nightfall, jam-packed with riders and tilting to one side from the unbalanced load on its roof. The three-wheeled jitney skidded to a stop, and the driver hobbled from the cab to the rear to shove the passengers further into the overcrowded compartment, forcing the mass of bodies to bulge through the side openings. He nudged the woman onto a stranger’s lap while pulling at her basket, a momentary tug-of-war until she clasped the basket to her chest and he let go.

“Strap the cripple to the roof,” he ordered.

Ignoring the driver, the two boys from the North stuffed Hai into the passengers’ compartment, his bony limbs bending as he folded into the gaps between intertwined bodies. The boys wedged their feet onto the flimsy back step and clung onto the roof’s edge. When the overloaded vehicle sputtered and then accelerated, the boy with one arm was blown off-balance, but he quickly steadied himself. The wind howled through the hole in his chest and filled the woman with emptiness as vast as the sea. The jitney careened through the night toward the lights of Ho Chi Minh City.

When the jitney stopped at the night market where peddlers lined the alleyway leading to her home, the woman smelled sundried anchovies, crispy fried Chinese crullers, and freshly baked French baguettes. There was something she had not noticed before—the earthen odor of oxen in the humid heat after the afternoon rain. She realized then why the neighborhood was called Ox Alley though they were long gone by the time her husband relocated her family from the Central Highlands to the southern capital one fiery summer.

The trail of pale lantern lights, flickering fireflies in the night, beckoned the northern boys to disembark. They untangled Hai from the ball of knotted bodies and insisted on carrying him home. The cripple, flanked by two teenagers to whom he promised the barrel of rice moonshine he had distilled, and the woman with the basket full of ocean debris, all merged into the market where people spoke an unrecognized language. When the woman strained her ears to listen, she caught distinct phrases she knew, interwoven with other familiar yet incomprehensible tongues. People moved side-by-side, crossing into each other’s path, overlapping like a palimpsest. It occurred to her that now she could see her hairstylist friend. She told Hai and the boys to go ahead home.

At the entrance to Phoenix Salon, the woman called out to her friend, “Đẹp ghê ta!”

“Ghê là đúng,” Phuong replied and lifted her long side-swept bangs to reveal a deep gash across her forehead. She rolled up a pants leg to expose another scar on her knee.

The woman said, “I should’ve taken my own advice and jumped off the train with you.” She eased into a chair and leaned her head back into the basin.

“What’s the story with you and the warden?” Phuong asked.

“I should’ve learned how to swim.” The woman sighed, welcoming the cool water on her dry, itchy scalp. “Or at least brought a life jacket.”

“Bồ kết shampoo?”

“Who would have thought? You bring pictures of your family, you bring gold leaves sewn in your hems, and you bring ashes—”

“Your brother-in-law Hai’s ashes?”

“In an old jar of mắm cá lóc in this shopping basket.” She laughed, remembering Hai’s objection to the smell of fermented snakehead. “We were almost there.”

“It’s fate.”

“Is it my fate to be married at sixteen? What would life have been if I were a young girl or an old woman when the North came south? But I was twenty-five. A husband and a daughter one day, and the next, they’re halfway across the world. My happiest years were in prison. Did I tell you?”

“What’s the story with you and the warden?” Phuong asked again.

“You just accept. Who would have thought? The currents didn’t even take us to the other side.”