Dragonfish: A Novel (6 page)

He bent down, speaking closer to my ear. “What made you think she ever belonged to you? Or that
you
ever belonged with her? You call her Suzy, but her name is Hong. It has always been and always will be Hong. America, Mr. Robert, is not the melting pot you Americans like to say it is. It’s oil and water. Things get stirred, sure, but they eventually separate and settle, and the like things always go back to each other. They’ve made new friends, perhaps even fucked them. But in their heart they will always return to where they belong. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

He sighed loudly and stood back up. “That’s enough. I’m tired of speeches.”

He lifted his shoe above my head and stomped on my hand with the heel.

I screamed out. The Mexican dismounted me. After a long writhing moment I forced myself to sit up. I held my injured hand like a dead bird. I couldn’t tell if anything was broken, but my knuckles and fingers felt hot with pain, enough to distract me from my aching shoulder and my wrist, now smeared wet with blood.

Junior pulled out the linen napkin again and tossed it at my feet, then handed the Mexican my gun. He wandered back to the piranha tanks, snug in his jacket again and with his hands in his pockets. As if ordering a child, he said to me, “If I ever see you again, I will do much worse. You will now go with Menendez here. He will take you back outside. Remember, you have seen nothing here. If necessary, I will hurt my new mother at your expense. I like her, but not that much.”

He nodded, and the Mexican led me out of the room by the
arm, gently this time. Junior’s voice crooned behind me: “Go home, Mr. Robert. And try to be happy.”

As I held my left hand wrapped in the napkin, the Mexican ushered me to another door, which revealed another staircase, which ascended into an office identical to the last one, except we stepped this time out of a painting of cranes flying over a rice paddy. The office opened into the pet store next door to the restaurant. We walked down the dark aisles, passing the droning aquariums and the birdcages and then the dog pens, where weary shadows stirred inside, their dry whimpers following us to the front entrance. Deep in the store, something squawked irritably.

I was released outside into a rainy, windy night. It was like stepping into another part of the country, far from the desert, near the ocean. I must have looked at Menendez with shock because he said, in a gruff but pleasant voice: “Monsoon season.”

He handed me my five-shot, closed the door, and I saw his giant shadowy figure fade back into the darkness of the store.

I
DROVE DOWN
I-15 toward California in soaked clothes. My left hand lay throbbing in my lap, the three broken fingers wrapped tightly in the linen napkin and my wrist bleeding through the cuff of gauze and tape I’d used from my first aid kit. I could still move my thumb and index finger, but they too felt swollen and numb.

It was ten o’clock, half an hour after I left Fuji West. The rain had finally stopped, but on my way out of town I saw two car accidents, one of which appeared deadly: a truck on its side, the other car with no front door, no windshield, a body beneath glistening tarp. I had worked so many of these scenes in my time, and yet
that evening they spooked me. In the desert night, rain falls like an ice storm.

I remembered another rainy night many years ago, when I came home from work all drenched and tired and Suzy made me strip down to my underwear and sat me at the dining table with a bowl of hot chicken porridge. As I ate, she stood behind me and hummed one of her sad Vietnamese ballads and dried my hair with a towel. I remember, between spoonfuls, trying to hum along with her.

I had often felt bitter in the moments I loved her most. What Junior said was only partly right. I did come to Vegas to save Suzy. Maybe whisk her away if she’d let me. I’d also had some hazy notion of punishing Sonny, though the farther away I drove from his son’s threats, the more I understood that I had actually come to punish Suzy—to give her a reason to regret leaving me. She had stayed all those years only because I was not yet replaceable. She then found a man who would come to hurt her more than I ever could, but at least he felt right to her, in a way I never did. “How can I be happy with children,” she once said, “if I’ve never been happy with anything else?”

Sonny Jr.’s parting words flashed through my mind. What did he know about other people’s happiness?

I took the very next exit and turned back toward Vegas, driving in the direction of their house. I had memorized the address, even looked it up on a map before the trip. It took me over an hour. By the time I turned into their neighborhood, the rain was coming down hard again and I could feel my tires slicing through the water on the streets.

Their house was two stories of stucco with a manicured rock garden and two giant palm trees out front. It looked big and warm. All the windows were dark. A red BMW sat in the circu
lar driveway behind the white Toyota Camry I bought Suzy years ago. God knows why she was still driving it, with what he could buy her now.

I parked by the neighbor’s curb and approached the side of the house, beneath the palm trees that swayed and thrashed in the wind. The rain fell in sweeping sheets, and I was drenched again within seconds.

On their patio, I saw the same kind of potted cacti that stood on our porch just two years before, except these porcelain pots were much nicer. And also there, like I was staring at the front door of our old house, was a silver cross hanging beneath the peephole.

The cool rain soothed my injured hand. I tightened the wet napkin, then donned the hood of my jacket.

I rang the doorbell and waited, shivering. I didn’t know who I wanted to answer, but when the porch light flicked on and the door finally opened, I understood what I wanted to do.

He looked exactly as he did on his driver’s license, except shorter than I expected, shorter than both Suzy and his son. He was wearing a tight white T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, his arms tan and muscular, his mustache underlining the furrows of curiosity and annoyance on his face.

“Yeah?” he muttered sleepily and ran a hand over the hard, bald contours of his scalp.

I raised my gun. He snapped his head back and froze. He was looking at me, not the gun. There was a stubborn quality in his expression, like he’d had a gun in his face before, like he was trying to decide if he should be afraid or not.

“Open the door and raise your hands above your head,” I said. “Then back up slowly until I tell you to stop.”

He obeyed and withdrew into the foyer, then farther into
the living room as I followed him inside, leaving some distance between us. I left the front door open, and the porch light spilled into the darkness.

I turned on a small lamp by the wall and another one next to the couch, which flushed the room with a warm light that did not quite reach the high ceilings or the darkness of the open rooms behind Sonny, but it was enough to get my bearings.

Their house was furnished with all the fancy stuff required of a wealthy, middle-aged couple: the big-screen TV, the lavish stereo system, the large aquarium by the foot of the staircase. It was hard not to notice the tall wooden crucifix above the fireplace and the vases on every table, filled with snapdragons and spider mums, oriental lilies, bluebells and gladioli. I had learned all their names over the years.

Rain was drumming the roof above us. I must have been a sight to him: pale and hooded, one hand swathed in bandages and the other wielding a gun, a stranger dripping water onto his wife’s pristine white carpet. She used to yell at me just for wearing shoes in the house.

I caught a whiff of shrimp paste in the air, that nostalgic smell I would forever link to the Vietnamese.

“What you want?” He spoke in a quiet but strained voice. “You want money, my wallet right there.”

He nodded at the table beside me, where his wallet lay by the telephone and some car keys. Behind the phone stood a photo of him and Suzy on a beach, in front of waters bluer than I’d ever swum.

“I got no other money in the house.”

His was a voice that liked being loud, that liked dancing around its listener. I could tell it took him some effort not to fling his words at me.

With the free thumb of my injured hand, I managed to pull the receiver off the phone and leave it face up on the table. “Anyone else in the house?”

“Nobody here.”

“Nobody? Your wife—where’s she?”

I could see him about to shake his head, like he was ready to deny having a wife, before he realized that he had all but pointed out the photo.

“She not here. She sleep at her mother house tonight. Just me.”

“I see two cars in the driveway.”

“What do that matter? I tell you it just me here tonight.”

“So if I make you take me upstairs, I won’t find anyone there?”

He looked stumped, like I had tricked him. He glanced, as if for answers, at the giant crucifix above the fireplace before returning his outrage on me. “I tell you nobody here,” he growled. “Take my wallet. My car. Take what you want and go.”

I kept my gun trained on him and walked over to the fireplace. Sure enough, on the mantelpiece, by a rosary and some candles, lay Suzy’s red journal. I wondered if Sonny understood or even cared about its contents. The crucifix peered down at us, a contortion of dark anguish on the wall. I tucked the journal into my back pocket.

Sonny’s eyes narrowed and he lowered his hands a bit. In the dim light, his shaved head made him look like some ghoulish monk. From the open door, I could hear rain slapping concrete, a violent sound.

“Tell you what,” I said, “I’m gonna let you go. Walk out the front door. Call for help if you want.”

He threw me a baffled scowl.

“Go on. If no one’s here, then you have nothing to worry about.”

Now his hands fell. “What this shit, man? Who are you?”

I took a step toward him, and he slowly raised his hands again without adjusting his glare on me.

“Last chance,” I said.

“I’m not go anywhere, man.”

There was a calm now in the flimsy way he held up his hands, like I was an annoying child with a toy gun. He was ready to fight to the death. He didn’t know, though, that he’d already won. He’d passed the test. Except how many more times would he save her like tonight? And what did that prove anyway?

I glanced up the stairs, at the dark hallway of doors at the top, wondering which room was their bedroom, which room might she be sleeping in, which door might she be standing behind right now, cupping her ear to the wood, holding her breath. A heaviness fell over me, like I no longer recognized that shrimp paste smell in the air or any of the outlandish flowers in this strange house—but I shook off the feeling.

I’d only glanced away for a second or two, but Sonny had already reached into the adjacent room and reappeared with a kitchen knife in his hand. He moved willfully, almost casually, and was coming at me like he either knew I wouldn’t shoot him or didn’t care if I did. I stumbled back a few steps, aiming at his chest, but I bumped hard into something and lost my balance, tumbling backward onto the coffee table, which met my back with a crashing thud.

He lunged on top of me, a rock of a man, and I managed somehow to grab his wrist in the crook of my bad hand, holding off the knife as best I could, but his other hand had seized my right wrist, his fingers digging into the bone so hard I thought it would snap and I lost my grip on the gun and it fell to the floor. He was dumb strong but I was still bigger, and growling through
my teeth I heaved him off me and he pulled me with him onto the carpet. In our struggle I was able to get enough space between us to knee him in the groin, which knocked the breath out of him and freed my good hand. A glass ashtray from the table lay overturned on the carpet and I grabbed it and struck him across the temple. He grunted and still clawed at my arm, so I struck him a second time and was about to bring down the ashtray again. But he’d gone limp.

My lips were trembling, my mouth dry as I swallowed that animal urge to crush his head. I snatched the knife from his hand and tossed it across the room.

I got up, backed away. I found my gun on the floor and trained it again on him. For a second, I thought he might be dead. In my fingers, I could still feel the thud of the ashtray on his skull. But he moved a little now, holding the side of his face with one hand.

Part of me was ready to shoot him while the rest of me rummaged through the consequences of walking away. I glanced at the dark staircase and nearly expected Suzy to be standing there, gazing down at me with horror. I hooded myself.

Sonny had raised himself on an elbow. He watched me slink toward the front door, ignoring the blood crawling down the side of his face, his eyes brimming with some unspoken promise. Behind him, in the aquarium, a pair of football-size fish were writhing around in the black water as though awakened by our violence.

I ran out into the rain, stumbling across the gushing lawn and through the surging water in the street to my car. My engine whined to life. As I sped past the house, I glimpsed Sonny standing on their front porch with his fists clenched at his side. I could have sworn a slimmer figure lurked behind him in the dark doorway.

I careened down the slick Vegas streets like an ambulance and passed cars one by one, my windshield wipers yelping back and forth. Only after I’d driven a few miles did I slow down. I turned on the radio. I reentered the highway. My body felt cool, and the rain was soothing on the roof of the car.

My bandaged hand, a claw now, began throbbing again. I looked at it several times like it was some talisman, amazed that I’d been able to use it. Then I remembered Suzy’s red journal in my back pocket and managed to pull it out. Cradled there in my lap, it too seemed miraculous and inexplicably precious. Stolen treasure with no value.

The Strip receded in the distance, a towering shining island in the night. I turned off the radio and let the rain drum in my ears. The night was a tunnel. I drove a steady clip down the highway and thought of nothing and everything all at once.