Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

  “No fortune cookie?”

  “Fortune cookies are reserved for paying customers,” Rasmei replied laconically.

  Only now Mickey noticed that the older girl wasn’t really fat - at least not like the slobby hausfraus-turned-soft-porn-queens in the grosser, triple-X girlie magazines. The Cambodian woman was short and compact with wide, almond eyes and a fleshy, pushed-in nose. The skin was dark as chocolate ice cream. An unromantic, no-nonsense face.

  “I have a proposition,” she said as he was reaching for a second helping.

  Mickey waved a greasy fork in the air. “Barter food for brawn.”

  Her wide nostrils flared. The younger girl sat down at the table and stared at her nails which were decorated in an elaborate, multicolored pattern. “Mearadey and I will do the actual building,” Rasmei clarified. “I only need you to straighten things out as you did earlier when we hadn’t spaced the boards properly.”

  Mickey pried open a plastic container of golden sauce dusted with bright red flecks of cayenne pepper. He didn’t know what pained him more: the prospect of dealing with the insufferable older sister or supervising the ineffectual Mearadey, with her straight, black hair falling down to the small of her slender back. “I could only help on weekends and, even then, it’d take a good month to get the walls covered, shingle the roof and hang doors. Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s a birthday present for our father.”

  An image of the sour-faced, ill-humored Mr. Butt flitted through his brain.

  Earlier in the week, while changing the oil in his truck, Mickey had met his new neighbor. Lying flat on his back, he had just cracked the nut on the oil pan and was sliding a plastic tub under the chassis when he looked up. An older man with dark features and a sunken chest was staring down at him like a stupid bug. The man scowled, and then walked briskly away without a word or friendly gesture. “Jerk!” Mickey pulled the plug out of the oil pan and felt the scalding oil curl around his thumb like a knife blade. “Weasel-faced, bastard!”

  Rasmei drifted to the window and admired her handiwork one yard over. “We could have easily gotten the front wall up, but for two, minor details.”

  “Which were?”

  “Doors and window.” Mearadey placed an ornately painted hand over her mouth and tittered fitfully.

  Mickey closed the containers, took a swig of beer and belched. “In the morning, with your perseverance and Mearadey’s moral support, we’ll build the front wall.” Rasmei gestured to her sister that it was time to leave and the lithe girl, who hadn’t uttered a word since entering the house, rose to her feet and padded soundlessly to the door.

  As they reached the living room, Rasmei said, “Are you eccentric or just making a fashion statement?”

  “I could ask the same of you,” Mickey shot back, indicating the loose fitting, wraparound silk skirts that both girls were wearing.

  She fingered one of the 30-caliber, shell casing that hung from his wide neck and scowled with a bland, almost clinical detachment. “My dress is called a sampot, a traditional Cambodian garment.” She scratched her fleshy nose. “You were in the army during the Vietnam War?”

  “Three years near Pleiku… at a firebase in the Annamese highlands.”

  “You made it home in one piece,” Rasmei observed. "The war was already over when I graduated from high school."

  "Didn't miss much." Mickey shot back. "In 1967, General Westmoreland decided to go after the Viet Cong with US infantry. Operation Fairfax. The goal was to harass and ambush enemy units operating in the countryside around Saigon." It was still light out but the sun was beginning to fade causing familiar images to blend and blur. "We killed 3,000 NVA and Viet Cong troops. Three thousand… a nice round number."

  "American casualties?" Rasmei asked.

  "Nineteen hundred troops were lost in the operation." Mickey spoke in a dull monotone as though citing historical statistics. "In April, there was another series of bloody engagements. We destroyed a thousand NVA at Loc Ninh, fifteen hundred more further north at Dak To."

  "Of course, we were just pissing in the wind. The whole, cruddy war was a fraud, a bad joke played out at our expense."

  Mickey spent three years in Viet Nam. When the lieutenant in charge of his unit stepped on an anti-personnel mine, he was promoted to platoon sergeant. His first kill occurred during a routine sentry duty at a firebase in the Mekong Delta. Not that there was anything routine about killing someone.

  Two hours into Mickey’s watch, a Viet Cong soldier dressed in baggy, blue cotton pants came up over a ridge into the clearing a hundred and fifty yards away. The man, in his early twenties, was lean and muscular. He carried an AK 47 assault rifle and a leather cartridge belt with ammunition clips slung around his neck. Alone, the enemy soldier sauntered towards him at a relaxed, loping gait as though he had no idea there might be any Americans close by. Mickey fixed the man's chest squarely in the crosshair of his scope sight and squeezed off a round. There was a delay between the report of exploding gun powder and its consequence. The man dropped or, more precisely, slumped forward on his face, and did not stir or make a sound. The bullet struck squarely in the heart.

  The body just lay there, inert and insubstantial, all the vibrant energy dissipated by the quarter-inch ball of lead. Mickey sat up in the foxhole and looked around. Nothing. The birds, which had fallen silent when the gun erupted, resumed their cheerful chatter. A warm breeze drew the scent of orange blossoms from God-knows-where into his nostrils driving out the acrid scent of burnt powder.

  Ten minutes passed. A pastel-colored moth, unearthly huge and ephemeral, flitted over the tall grass before disappearing into the thick brush. The body never moved. Not that he expected it to, but now the trajectory of his life catapulted crazily off course. A man was dead and Mickey was sitting comfortably in a foxhole surrounded by orange blossoms and a chortling chorus of birds and bull frogs.

  For the next month, every young, Vietnamese woman he passed was the dead man's wife or kid sister; every middle-aged couple his mother and father anxiously waiting a triumphant homecoming and, with each passing day, fearing the worse. Other murderous battles would engage his mind; he fought his heart out and counted his blessing to remain among the living. But this first kill was too ordinary and unambiguous. The man in the blue pants came up over the ridge, and Mickey placed a 30-millimeter slug through his heart. The enemy combatant had no opportunity to defend himself - not that war was a gentleman's sport; in retrospect, Mickey felt no obligation, moral or otherwise, to act differently.

  The first years following the war, Mickey carried on an obsessive, almost ritualistic, dialogue with the dead man’s family. At weird hours of the early morning when his insomnia kicked into overdrive, he would review the circumstances surrounding the Vietnamese soldier's death. He gathered the family members together inside his head - a confluence of sympathetic minds and spirits. Never asking their forgiveness, rather he begged them to understand the insane logic of war.

  The scene always played itself out with the same, predictable denouement, his imagination unable to sway - or even marginally influence - the outcome. The dead man’s family listened impassively, without the slightest hint of emotion. In the end, they simply turned and shuffled silently away, leaving Mickey to rot in the purgatory of an inconsolable conscience.

  Kicking off his left shoe, Mickey removed the sock, and revealed a jagged inch-and-a-half long scar resembling a Rorschach inkblot on the instep.

  “How’d that happen?” Rasmei inquired.

  “Along with landmines, the VC buried bamboo stakes in the mud and high grass. I caught a punji stick on a routine patrol. Spent the next, three months recuperating at a naval hospital in Yokuska, Japan.” Mickey put his sock back on. “Sometimes, the bastards crapped on the sharpened sticks.”

  Mearadey grimaced and looked away. Her sister never flinched.

  “Four years after your war ended,” Rasmei said, “the North Vietnamese inv
aded my homeland and liberated us from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. I was ten years old. My family fled north along Route 6 to Angkor Wat, then west into Thailand. Five years later, we immigrated to America.” Rasmei shook her head thoughtfully. “Perhaps you have bad feelings toward my people because of your experience during the war.”

  Mickey put his shoe and sock back on. “I’m a misanthrope not a racist,” He replied gruffly.

  “Then you are just like my father,” she said without explanation and walked out into the warm night air, her addle-brained sister following on her heels.

  The next morning after finishing off the last of the six treasure chicken, Mickey sidled over to the Butt’s back yard. Placing a base and top plate side by side, he marked the openings for the doors and window. Less than an hour later, the fourth wall was plumbed and toe nailed in place. “We’ll need half-inch plywood for the floor and roof. About the siding, do you have any preference?”

  “Whatever you suggest,” Rasmei replied.

  “Texture one-eleven is durable and takes a stain well.”

  “Draw up a shopping list. I’ll have it delivered.”

  Mickey scratched his crotch and stared at his Chevy, 2-ton pickup truck parked in the driveway. “There are a few small items - joist hangers, hinges, galvanized nails. I’ll swing by Home Depot one night after work.”

  “Let me know; I’ll join you.” Before he could mount an intelligible protest, she added, “My father is so pleased with his new shed! I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

  On Thursday late in the day, Mickey pulled up in front of the Cambodians’ home and beeped the horn. Rasmei hurried out to the truck. “There’s been a slight change in plans.” As she spoke the front door opened; Mearadey, her father, mother and an elderly woman with a wrinkled face filed onto the front lawn. Rasmei hauled herself up into the cab of the pickup truck and waved at her relatives. “My family will be joining us.”

  The entourage piled into a metallic blue Subaru. “I don’t get it,” Mickey grumbled.

  “It’s a cultural thing. Cambodians tend to go places and make important decisions as a group.”

  Mickey turned the engine over and pulled away from the curbed. Immediately the Subaru inched up behind him. In the rear view mirror he could see the father, staring stiffly straight ahead. “Your old man, ...does he ever smile?”

  Rasmei considered the question briefly. “No, not often.”

  At the lumber supply store Mickey got a cart and loaded the bottom with twelve-foot, pressure treated two-by-fours. The elderly woman with the wrinkled face said something to Rasmei in her native tongue. “She wants to know what the wood is for.”

  “The sub floor.”

  Rasmei translated. The woman pointed to another pile of lumber and spoke again, favoring the n’s and g’s, in a rubbery, singsong fashion. “She says these boards are less expensive.”

  “Perhaps,” Mickey muttered under his breath, “Granny would like to subcontract the project.”

  “She’s just trying to be thrifty.”

  “Tell her that these boards are stronger and won’t rot as quickly.”

  Rasmei translated. The old woman’s wiry, chicken neck bobbed up and down approvingly.

  The next aisle over, Mickey found the metal joist hangers, hinges, door latch sets and 2-inch, galvanized nails. Again, the old woman questioned the nails. “Tell her they’re zinc coated to resist rust. That’s why they’re more expensive.” Only Mr. Butt, whose thoughts were engaged elsewhere, appeared less than satisfied with the explanation.

  On the ride home Rasmei said, “That went well.”

  “Sure did,” Mickey confirmed and took one last look in the rear view mirror. Rasmei’s mother was sitting in the passenger seat gesturing with her hands and laughing heartily. Her husband, impervious to her bright humor, looked thoroughly morose.

  “Mearadey bought a cloth, carpenters apron so she will have a place to put the nails and hold her hammer,” Rasmei said.

  “Does she know how to talk?”

  “Of course she can. She’s just very shy.”

  Mickey shrugged. “She’s never said a thing in my presence.”

  On Saturday Mickey showed the girls how to evenly space the metal hangers for the sub floor while he snapped a blue chalk line and, with a 7¼-inch, Makita circular saw, trimmed the flooring to fit. Mearadey swaggered about the yard getting little accomplished but looking radiant with her apron full of annular nails, the hammer slung rakishly from her hip. At one point, she went into the house and returned with a pitcher of ice tea.

  “According to Rasmei,” Mickey said, “you’re not a deaf mute.” Still holding the empty drink tray, Mearadey looked perplexed. “Say something.”

  “What do you want me to say?” she replied

  “That’s more than enough.”

  An hour later, he left them with a scroll saw to trim the openings and hang the texture one-eleven. “Next week we’ll work on the roof.”

  Mickey went home and took a triple hit of adapin - 150 mg - to calm his nerves and fell asleep watching Three Stooges reruns on the cable channel.

  Waking late in the afternoon to the muffled sounds of oriental music, he staggered out of bed and peaked through the living room blinds. The Butt family was having a cookout. Mearadey was mooning over a muscular, boy with shoulder-length hair. Meanwhile, an admiring crowd had gathered around the skeletal shed. They pawed at the rough-cut wood, kicked at the sole plate. A young boy hoisted himself up through the naked window opening and hung upside down like a monkey from the top sill.

  In a chaise lounge 50 feet away sat the master of ceremonies, stone-faced Mr. Butt. His wife was moving back and forth among the guests with a tray of drinks. But for the difference in ages, Mrs. Butt and Rasmei could have passed for identical twins. She had the same squat physique - face as flat as a Mekong Delta rice paddy, the broad, ill-defined nose thrown on as an afterthought.

  The rear door opened. Rasmei, dressed in dungaree shorts and a plaid blouse emerged with a platter of hors d’oeuvres. A man, fortyish and heavyset with dark-rimmed glasses, immediately approached and began following the girl about the yard like an obedient, well-trained dog.

  Mickey went to the hall closet, rummaged around and emerged with his mother’s high-powered, birding binoculars. In the bathroom, he sat on the toilet and lifted the Levolor blind a fraction of an inch. Rasmei and the heavyset man were gone. Vanished. Mrs. Butt was bending down to offer her husband a drink. The lens blurred. Pulling back a half turn on the adjusting knob, husband and wife eased into sharp focus. Mr. Butt accepted a glass of pink liquid and, as the portly, middle-aged woman turned away, his features softened, dissolved like wet, potter’s clay spun on a wheel.

  “Damn!” Mickey wrenched the lenses away from his eyes. Had the man smiled - ecstatically, with unrestrained joy - or was his medicated mind playing tricks? Either way, the sight of Mr. Butt showing strong affection was more than he could stomach. Mickey went into the other room. He took his clothes off, climbed into bed and pulled the covers up over his head.

  Later that night, Rasmei appeared with a bag of food. “Where’s your sister?” Mickey asked.

  “Went on a date.” She brought the food into the kitchen, placed the bag on the table and began opening the containers. “Shanghai rice cakes,” she pointed to a pale white, doughy dish. On a separate dish she arranged mint, cucumber, fresh lettuce, bean sprouts, noodles, peanut milk and soft rolls.

  Mickey sniffed the mild aroma. “I ate something similar in country.”

  She went to the refrigerator, cracked open a beer and placed it on the table next to him. “Bee Boong,” she indicated the second container… it’s a traditional Vietnamese dish.” Rasmei surveyed the room. Empty beer cans, four and five deep now, fanned out the length of the counter; a week’s worth of Brandenburg Gazette newspapers littered the floor near the back door. “The pigs in my former village had cleaner personal habits.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, but could they build a storage shed?”

  She grinned but then, just as quickly, the humor faded. “We had a barbecue today and a man asked me to marry him.” Rasmei tossed the words out in an offhand manner. “For the third time.”

  Mickey rubbed the rim of the bottle, sipping at the foam. “I assume you refused on both, previous occasions.” Rasmei responded with a hollow smile. “Why did you compare me to your father the other day?” he asked.

  She sat down across from him and removed a beer can from the arm of a chair. Liquid had seeped through the finish to the porous wood below and leaving yet another soiled ring. “You’re both so mistrustful.”

  “Which tells me nothing,” Mickey said.

  The sun had set, all the color - reds, blues, yellows and grainy purples - washed out of the evening sky. Through the open window, they could hear the screams and catcalls of the neighbor’s children, cannonballing off the deck of their above-ground pool. With the light almost completely gone, the mother begged them, for the hundredth time, to come in for the night. Her request precipitated a fresh outburst of hoots and jeers sending small bodies catapulting into the darkened water. Rasmei glanced at Mickey and looked away. “And you’re both so angry.”

  Sunday they installed windows.

  Because it was only a storage shed, there was no reason to insulate the rough openings. Mearadey was gone - quit without notice. Off somewhere with the new boyfriend. Rasmei had discarded her clumsy, wooden hammer for Mickey’s steel-shanked Estwing with the 13-inch throw. By now she had learned to let the weighty tool do the work, the power coming from the shoulder rather than her slender wrist.

  Whack. Whack. Whack. With three, arcing blows, she set the finished nails flush against the coarse wood. “On the world news last night they reported more fighting in my homeland. People fleeing north to the Tai border.”