Dragonfish: A Novel (31 page)

Evening Mass must have ended hours before, though the church doors were still unlocked. Inside, we found no one. There was some light from chandeliers and votive candles along the walls, but at that hour the church was shrouded in dusk and silence.

Happy and I made our way down the aisle, hoping to find Suzy asleep in one of the pews. I suggested we go search the confessionals, but Happy stopped halfway up the aisle. I thought at first that she was pointing at the life-size crucifix above the darkened sanctuary. It took me a moment to see Suzy’s small figure below it, standing behind the altar as casually as she would at the kitchen sink at home. One hand kept coming up to her mouth, and as we quietly approached the sanctuary, I could see that she was chewing on something, that it was in fact the Body of Christ. She was picking the communion wafers out of the Eucharist bowl like they were potato chips. Behind her, the doors of the tabernacle stood open.

Happy and I reached the front pew, where Suzy had left her suitcase. She hadn’t noticed us yet. Her eyes were directed at the high arched ceiling of the church. Was there something up there along the shadowy rafters? Something beyond the shadows? If it was God she saw, her face showed no sign of revelation or communion. Each time she brought a wafer to her lips, she bit into it indifferently, chewing it as she would a stale cookie. The way her face caught the pale amber light from the chandeliers, she seemed at once beautiful to me and intolerably alien.

I was too baffled to do anything—to even
want
to do anything. Happy finally called out to her. When she turned to us, she seemed unsurprised by our presence—calm and clear
headed. But then her eyes began to tear up. I remember, before the floodlights abruptly turned on, her saying something in Vietnamese to Happy. It sounded regretful, an apology perhaps, an admission.

A voice boomed behind us. The parish priest was stomping up the aisle in his cassock, shouting, What is this? What are you all doing up there?

He hurried past us and up the sanctuary steps and seized the Eucharist bowl from Suzy, covering it with his hand as he continued chastising all three of us, demanding that we leave the premises at once.

Happy took Suzy by the hand and rushed her out of the church as I stayed behind and tried my best to explain everything to the priest, who knew Suzy and me from Mass but seemed too furious to recognize us. By the time I came out to the parking lot, Suzy was sitting alone in her Toyota and Happy was insisting that I not talk to her, that I should drive home, cool off, and let her take care of everything.

An hour later, when Suzy walked into our bedroom with her suitcase and returned it to the closet, the sight of her instantly drained me of all the questions and bitter words I’d stored up. She peered at me from across the room, unsure if I would yell at her or ignore her. She finally approached the bed and without taking off her shoes crawled onto the sheets and burrowed into my arms, crying softly until we both fell asleep.

There would never be a right time to ask her. We immediately went on with our life together, ignoring what had happened. We started eating out and going to the movies more frequently and even took trips to the Redwoods and other parks that she had always wanted to visit. At my suggestion, we began renovating the entire town house, tearing down the rooms one by one and
rebuilding each with our own hands, slowly and patiently and meticulously so we’d not only get it right but also leave ourselves more still to rebuild, to fix and improve. The marriage would end before the renovation was complete, but for four more years we fed off that silent and inexplicable need for each other. That was enough, at least for me.

I did ask Happy once if she found out why Suzy almost left me and how she had convinced her to come home. She would only say that Suzy never truly wanted to leave. I never thought to ask about what she’d been doing at the church. In my mind, she’d simply been trying to talk to a God who wasn’t answering—the only kind I’ve ever known.

I do remember looking through her empty suitcase the day after her return. Inside an inner pocket, I found a brand-new passport, issued that past week, and an envelope full of cash that must have taken her many months, perhaps years, to save.

T
HE CABDRIVER
was still racing through the night a good fifteen miles over the speed limit. We passed shopping malls that straddled the highway, closed down for the night, then golf-course mansions and sprawling housing estates, then suddenly a lone casino, majestic and brilliant in the night, then more houses and condominiums, lit-up gas stations and cold commercial buildings and all those other badges of suburban peace.

The Strip had long vanished behind us, no sign of the pyramid light or anything.

I asked the driver how much longer we had to go. He said, “Five minutes max,” and nudged the gas pedal.

I checked the battery on the cell phone. It was still half full.

The wipers squealed across the windshield, startling me. In
the yellow nimbus of the highway lights, you could see the snow flurries buzzing about like flies.

“Fucking snow in the desert,” the driver said, unimpressed. “Left Jersey to get away from this.” He didn’t seem to care if I was listening. “Betcha anything people gonna die tonight. People here can’t even drive in the rain.”

He said something else, but I was no longer paying attention.

I rolled down my window and tossed the cell phone out into the night.

T
HE SNOW WAS FALLING
fast by the time the taxi dropped me off at Happy’s gated neighborhood. I didn’t ask the driver to wait. There was no telling how long it would take to convince Happy to give me the letters, but I’d already decided I wasn’t leaving without them. My immediate concern—despite all the others I should have had—was whether I’d chosen the right address.

The security gates were closed. I stood shivering beneath the streetlamp in a chamber of yellow light that felt like the inside of a snow globe. Soon a car approached and I followed it through the gates and into the neighborhood, its tire trail and my footprints the first markings on the fresh snow.

A narrow road led me down a long, winding block of identical one-story duplexes, which were themselves two mirrored halves, each with the same Mediterranean-style roof and pink stucco walls and sometimes the same collection of palm trees and bushes, the only distinguishing feature the color of the front door or the car in the driveway. As I wandered through the falling
snow with Happy’s address in my hand, I wondered how long it had taken her to not get lost in this maze of sameness.

I passed some kids playing in the snow without coats or gloves. They slid across small patches of lawn that were still green underneath, shook powder off tree branches that still had leaves. This must have been their first snowfall. I remembered a few flurries that instantly melted on the streets of Oakland thirty years ago, when I was in my teens. It stunned me that my first real snowfall ended up being in the desert, of all places, that forty-five years in the world had only gotten me this far from home.

By the time I found Happy’s house, I couldn’t feel my face or my fingers and had to brush snow out of my hair. Several cars were parked along the curb across the street, covered in a thin layer of snow, none of them familiar. Her side of the street was empty, as was her driveway, her car probably parked in the garage. The blinds on all her windows were closed too, but the lights in one were on. I rechecked the address above the garage. Even as I approached the front door, I kept wondering if I had the wrong half of the duplex.

I knocked and waited, then knocked again. I thought about calling out her name, but all the houses on the block were close together, and even my knocking had sounded too loud.

I tried the knob and it turned and the door opened. I spoke into the doorway, “Happy? Are you there?”

On the wall of the dark entryway, a painting of a young Vietnamese woman in a yellow
áo dài
smiled at me. She was holding her rice hat against her belly, her long black hair falling over her shoulder. Beside the painting stood a coat rack that held Happy’s black peacoat.

I stepped into the entryway and could see part of the living
room around the corner and the illuminated red lampshade that ruddied the shadows.

“Happy?” I called out again, my annoyance growing now that I was sure I had the right place. “It’s Robert. I’m coming in.”

I closed the front door and approached the living room. Turning the corner, I saw lit candles on the kitchen counter, then an ivory couch across the way with something long and black draped over its back. Another coat. Beyond the couch was an unlit hallway that led to four closed doors.

When I stepped onto the cream carpet, my wet shoes stained it, so I bent down to untie my laces, and it was only then that I noticed the darker shoeprints ahead of me.

I pulled out my gun and stepped farther into the living room. To my far left, sitting in an armchair beside an unlit Christmas tree, was Sonny.

His head was reclined on the seatback, his dull eyes narrowed on me. He seemed unsurprised by my presence and uninterested in the gun I had on him. His own he held limply, pointed at the floor. It was like my appearance had just awakened him from a deep nap. Beside him on the end table was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker.

“Set the gun on the floor,” I ordered him and moved behind the couch.

He lifted his head. His face was flushed. Tiredly, he said, “This again, huh?”

He was right, of course. Even the shadows gave me déjà vu. I’d spent the last twenty-four hours wishing I had shot him five months ago, and here I was back in the same spot, made impotent again by fear and curiosity.

“Why are you here?” I said. “Where’s Happy?”

“She not here no more. She gone.”

“Gone where? Why?”

He shook his head as though the questions were too stupid to answer.

“I said drop the gun, Sonny. Did you hurt Happy? Where is she?”

“Where my wife? Where my fucking money? You know that?”

He came to life, wincing as he sat up and plunked his gun on the table and grabbed the pack of cigarettes lying there. He lit up and massaged his scalp with his other hand, then ran it roughly across his face like he was wiping off the exhaustion. His smoking hand, I noticed, was shaking slightly. He was an emotional drunk, unsurprisingly, liable to be at his most violent but also, I was hoping, his most sincere.

“Suzy’s gone,” I said. “She’s left town for good. I don’t know where, but I know she’s not coming back. To me or to you.”

“
Suzy
,” he muttered and shook his head. “You give her that name?”

“Let’s bury it right here, Sonny. She’s gone, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Go on with your life. Let me go home and go on with mine.”

“That it, huh? We just say bye-bye, huh?”

“You brought me here to find her, but there’s nothing to find.”

“My stupid son—that
his
idea. He don’t tell me
nothing
. He say he take care of everything, but he don’t get shit done. Look at you. What you do here now? You point the gun at me like this your house. I pay for this house! My son—it all his fucking idea! Me? I want bring you here and fuck you up, man.”

His voice was rousing his body, his fists tightening with each word. I’d been holding on to some possibility of getting him out of the house so I could search for the letters, but my other con
cern now was how to get myself out without one of us getting shot.

The phone beside him rang, startling only me. After the third ring, Sonny lifted the receiver, killed the call, and left the receiver upturned on the end table beside his gun. The dial tone droned between us.

“Who’re you ignoring, Sonny?”

He dumped a couple of cigarettes onto the table for himself, then held out the pack. “Smoke with me.”

When I didn’t move, he flung the pack peevishly at me and it landed on the carpet by my feet. “Smoke a fucking cigarette, huh?”

“Why?”

“We talk. Like man to man. You want go home, right?”

I had only two choices now: shoot him or humor him. I reached down for the pack, keeping my gun trained on his heart, and shook a cigarette out onto my lips. I lit it with the candle on the kitchen counter behind me and took it in like a long drink.

The phone had gone into its echoing off-hook tone like some distant siren. Sonny stole a swill of the Johnnie Walker and winced again. Then he relaxed, and a wry smile appeared on his face.

“Nowadays, man, I love play poker with American. The old day I sit down at the table and they think I don’t know shit. They loud, they laugh, they think they run over me because I small, I talk funny. It don’t matter I have good game or bad game. They always think they better. But
now
, man, I talk louder, I laugh louder, make bigger joke, especially when I beat them, take all their money. I love when they don’t got nothing to say. It’s like I broke their dream, man. It’s like I take their money
and
their voice.”

“Why’re you telling me this?”

“You fight in the war? I fight with Americans in the war. They get drunk and piss in the street in front of my mother. They drive around and try to pull the pretty girl on their Jeep and laugh when the girl scream and run away. They wanna fuck all the Vietnamese girl, every one they see. Sometime, they fall in love too. One fucking GI, I remember he tall and so white he look like he sick. Always call us ‘slant-eye’ and ‘Marvin the motherfuckin’ ARVN.’ He make joke we not understand, pat us on our head like we little boy. You know what this guy do? He fall in love with a bar girl, man. He buy her all the gifts and promise he take her home and marry her. He so dumb he don’t know she just want go to America and take his money. So what happen? She find another GI who promise her better thing and she leave this guy. And he so fucking sad, he not talk to nobody for a whole week. Nothing. Then one day, he find the other GI in the street. He not say a word. He just walk up and stick his knife right here.”