Last Night in Twisted River (45 page)

The daughter, Soo, was a little jewel. “She’s not wearing a diaper?” Danny asked the surgeon, remembering Joe at that age.

“Girls are toilet-trained before boys,
honey
,” Yi-Yiing told him, with what struck the writer as an overacted emphasis on the
honey
word—but the cook had laughed, and so had Youn. Danny would wonder, later, if perhaps Youn had also been relieved that her relationship with her fiction teacher was so efficiently ended. (What need was there for any further explanation?)

The days when the Korean doctor was in Chicago were easy enough, and Joe could see with his own eyes how innocent a two-year-old really was—about dangers in the road, obviously, but about angels falling from the sky, too. The eight-year-old could observe for himself that little Soo was capable of believing anything.

The fragrant nightie under the pillow on Youn’s side of the bed turned out to be the beige one, and Danny found a discreet moment to give it back to her. Now
no
evidence of her remained in his bedroom. Youn slept with her tiny daughter in her writing room; they were both small enough to fit in the bed in that extra bedroom, although Danny had suggested to Youn that she could put Soo in the
extra
extra bedroom. (He’d noticed that Youn’s husband had slept in that room, alone.)

“A two-year-old shouldn’t sleep
unattended,” Youn
had told Danny, who realized that he’d misread the curiosity with which Youn had scrutinized Joe; she’d simply been wondering what changes to expect in her daughter between the ages of two and eight. (As for what she’d written about, and why, there would never be a satisfactory explanation, Danny supposed.)

When Kyung came back from Chicago, and the doctor soon left again with his little girl—they went home to Seoul together—Youn wasted no time in finding a place of her own to live, and by the next semester she had transferred to someone else’s fiction workshop. Whether she ever finished her novel-in-progress was immaterial to the writer Danny Angel. Whether Youn would one day become a published novelist also mattered little to Danny, who knew firsthand that—in Youn’s time in Iowa City—her fiction had been an almost complete success.

It was Yi-Yiing’s success, at pretending to be Danny’s girlfriend, that would linger a little longer. The ER nurse was not naturally flirtatious, but for months after the need to pretend she and Danny were a couple, Yi-Yiing would occasionally brush against the writer, or trail her fingers, or the back of her hand, against Danny’s cheek. It seemed she had sincerely forgotten herself, for she would instinctively stop—as soon as she’d started something. Danny doubted that the cook ever saw her do this; if Joe saw, the eight-year-old took no notice.

“Would you prefer it if I dressed normally around the house?” Yi-Yiing would one day ask the writer. “I mean, maybe it’s ‘enough already’ with the pajamas.”

“But you’re the Pajama Lady—that’s just who you are,” Danny told her evasively.

“You know what I mean,” Yi-Yiing said to him.

She stopped wearing them—or, perhaps, she only slept in them. Her normal clothes were a safer barrier between them, and what had amounted to the occasional contact—the brush of her passing behind his back, the touch of her fingertips or the knuckles on her small hands—stopped soon after as well.

“I miss Yi-Yiing’s pajamas,” Joe said to his dad one morning, when they were walking to the boy’s school.

“I do, too,” Danny told him, but by then the writer was seeing someone else.

WITH YOUN GONE FROM
their lives—especially later, in their last year in Iowa City, when they were living in the third house on Court Street—their regular habits resumed as if uninterrupted. The third house was on the other side of Court Street, near Summit, where Danny conducted a discreet daytime affair with an unhappy faculty wife whose husband was cheating on her. The back alley, where Joe had been tempted to pity himself—while he watched Max practice skids on his “backup” bike—was also gone from their lives, as was the possum. The Yokohamas, Sao and Kaori, still took turns babysitting for Joe, and everyone—all of them—gathered with a seemingly increasing need (or desperation) at Mao’s.

The cook knew in advance how much he would miss the Cheng brothers—almost as much as he would miss Yi-Yiing. It was never knowing what it might have been like to be with the Hong Kong nurse that Danny would miss, though his return to Vermont was preceded by another kind of closure.

As their Iowa adventure was concluding, so was—at long last—the war in Vietnam. The mood at Mao’s was not predisposed to a happy ending. “Operation Frequent Wind,” as the helicopter evacuation of Saigon was called—“Operation More Bullshit,” Ketchum had called it—turned out to be a devastating distraction from the dinnertime preparations at the Asian and French restaurant. The TV in the little kitchen off the Coralville strip proved to be a magnet for discontent.

April 1975 had been a bad month for business at Mao’s. There were four drive-by brick-throwings—one of the restaurant’s window-breakers was actually a chunk of cement the size of a cinder block, and one was a rock. “Fucking patriot farmers!” Xiao Dee had called the vandals. He and the cook had canceled a shopping trip to Chinatown because Xiao Dee was convinced that Mao’s was under attack—or, as Saigon fell, the restaurant would come under heavier siege. Ah Gou was running short of his favorite ingredients. (With Tony Angel’s help, there were a few more items from Italy on the menu than usual.)

All that year, the South Vietnamese soldiers were deserting in droves. The runaway soldiers had been rounding up their families and converging on Saigon, where they must have believed the Americans would help them escape the country. In the last two weeks of April, the U.S. had airlifted sixty thousand foreigners and South Vietnamese; hundreds of thousands more would soon be left to find their own way out. “It will be sheer chaos,” Ketchum had predicted. (“What did we expect would happen?” the logger would say later.)

Did we
care
what would happen? Danny was thinking. He and Joe had a table to themselves at Mao’s, and Yi-Yiing had joined them for dinner. She’d skipped her shift in the emergency room because she had a cold; she didn’t want to make a lot of sick or injured people any worse, she’d told Danny and Joe. “I’m
already
going to make you two sick—you two
and
Pop,” she said to them, smiling.

“Thanks a lot,” Danny told her. Joe was laughing; he adored Yi-Yiing. The boy would miss having his own nurse when he was back in Vermont. (And I’ll miss having a nurse for him, the writer was thinking.)

There were two couples at one table, and three businessmen types at another. It was a quiet night for Mao’s, but it was still early. The boarded-up window didn’t improve the looks of the front entrance, Danny was thinking, when one of the Yokohamas came out of the kitchen, her face as white as her apron and her lower lip trembling. “Your dad says you should see what’s on television,” the Japanese girl said to the writer. “The TV’s in the kitchen.”

Danny got up from the table, but when Joe tried to go with him, Yi-Yiing said, “Maybe you should stay with me, Joe.”

“Yes, you
stay!”
Sao or Kaori told the boy. “You shouldn’t see!”

“But I want to see what it is,” Joe said.

“Do what Sao says, Joe—I’ll be right back,” his dad told him.

“I’m Kaori,” the Japanese twin said to Danny. She burst into tears. “Why am I getting the feeling that all ‘gooks’ are the same to you Americans?”

“What’s on the TV?” Yi-Yiing asked her.

The two couples had been laughing about something; they hadn’t heard Kaori’s outburst. But the businessmen types had frozen; the
gooks
word held them poised over their beers.

Ah Gou’s smart girlfriend, Tzu-Min, was the maître d’ that night. Xiao Dee was too agitated by the brick-throwing patriot farmers to be safely allowed out of the kitchen.

“Go back in the kitchen, Kaori,” Tzu-Min told the sobbing girl. “No crying permitted out here.”

“What’s on the TV?” Yi-Yiing asked the maître d’.

“Joe shouldn’t see it,” Tzu-Min told her. Danny had already disappeared into the kitchen.

It was bedlam back there. Xiao Dee was shouting at the television. Sao, the other Japanese twin, was throwing up in the big sink—the one the dishwasher scrubbed the pots and pans in.

Ed, the dishwasher, stood aside; a recovering alcoholic, he was a World War II vet with several faded tattoos. The Cheng brothers had given Ed a job at a time when no one else would, and Ed felt loyal to them, though the small Coralville kitchen made him feel claustrophobic at times, and the political talk at Mao’s was a foreign country to him. Ed had no use for foreign countries; that we were getting out of Vietnam was good enough for him. He’d been in the navy, in the Pacific. Now one of the Japanese twins was vomiting in his sink and the other one was in tears. (Ed might have been thinking that he had killed their relatives; if so, he was not sorry about it.)

“How’s it going, Ed?” Danny said to the dishwasher.

“It’s not going too good right now,” Ed told him.

“Kissinger is a war criminal!” Xiao Dee was screaming. (Henry Kissinger had appeared, albeit briefly, on the television.) Ah Gou, who was chopping scallions, brandished his cleaver at the mere mention of the hated Kissinger, but now the TV returned to that image of enemy tanks rolling through the streets of Saigon; the tanks were closing in on the U.S. Embassy there, or so some nameless voice said. It was almost the end of April—these were the last airlifts, the day before Saigon surrendered. About seventy American helicopters had been shuttling between the walled-off courtyard of the embassy and the U.S. warships off the coast; as many as sixty-two hundred people were rescued that day. The last two helicopters to leave Saigon carried away the U.S. ambassador and the embassy’s marine guards. Hours later, South Vietnam surrendered.

But that wasn’t what was hard to watch on the little TV in the kitchen at Mao’s. There were more people who wanted to leave Saigon than there were helicopters. Hundreds would be left behind in the embassy’s courtyard. Dozens of Vietnamese clung to the skids of the last two helicopters to leave; they fell to their deaths as the choppers lifted away. The television just kept showing it. “Those poor people,” the cook had said, seconds before Sao threw up in Ed’s sink.

“They’re not
people
, not to most Americans—they’re
gooks!”
Xiao Dee was shouting.

Ah Gou was watching the TV instead of the scallions; he chopped the first digit off the index finger of his left hand. Kaori, still in tears, fainted; the cook dragged her away from the stove. Danny took a dish towel and began to twist it, tightly, around Ah Gou’s upper arm. The tip of Big Brother’s finger lay in a pool of blood with the chopped scallions.

“Go get Yi-Yiing,” the cook said to Sao. Ed took a wet towel and wiped the girl’s face. Sao was as insubstantial-looking as her fainted twin, but she had stopped throwing up, and, like a ghost, she drifted away to the dining room.

When the swinging door to the dining room opened, Danny heard one of the businessmen say, “What kind of crazy, fucked-up place is this, anyway?”

“Ah Gou cut off his finger,” he heard Sao say to Yi-Yiing.

Then the door swung closed and Danny didn’t hear how Sao or Tzu-Min or Yi-Yiing answered the businessman, or if any of the women had tried. (Mao’s
was
a crazy, fucked-up place that night when Saigon was falling.)

The door to the dining room swung open again, and they all came into the kitchen—Yi-Yiing with young Joe, Tzu-Min and Sao. Danny was mildly surprised that the three businessmen types and the two couples weren’t with them, though there was no room for anyone else in the chaotic kitchen.

“Thank God they all ordered the guinea hen,” the cook was saying.

Kaori had sat up on the floor. “The two couples are having the guinea hen,” she said. “The business guys ordered the ravioli.”

“I just meant the couples,” Tony Angel said. “I’m feeding them first.”

“The business guys are ready to walk out—I’m warning you,” Tzu-Min told them.

Yi-Yiing found the tip of Ah Gou’s finger in the scallions. Xiao Dee wrapped his arms around Ah Gou while the cook poured vodka on the stump of his left index finger. Big Brother was still screaming when Yi-Yiing held out the fingertip, and Tony Angel poured more vodka on it; then she put the fingertip back where it belonged. “Just hold it on,” she told Big Brother, “and stop screaming.”

Danny was sorry that Joe was watching the television; the ten-year-old seemed transfixed by that image of the people clinging to the helicopters’ skids, and then falling off. “What’s happening to them?” the boy asked his dad.

“They’re dying,” Danny said. “There’s no room for them on the helicopters.”

Ed was coughing; he went out the kitchen door. There was an alley back there—it was used for deliveries, and for picking up the trash—and they all thought that Ed was just stepping out for a cigarette. But the dishwasher never came back.

Yi-Yiing took Ah Gou out the swinging door and through the dining room; he held his severed fingertip in place, but now that Danny was no longer tightening the towel around his upper arm, Big Brother was bleeding profusely. Tzu-Min went with them. “I guess I’m going to give everyone in the emergency room my cold, after all,” Yi-Yiing was saying.

“What the fuck is going on?” one of the businessmen shouted. “Is there anyone working here, or what?”

“Racists! War criminals! Fascist pigs!” Ah Gou yelled at them, still bleeding.

In the kitchen, the cook said to his son and grandson, “You’re my sous chefs now—we better get started.”

“There are only two tables to deal with, Pop—I think we can manage this,” Danny told him.

“If we just ignore the business guys, I think they’ll leave,” Kaori said.

“Nobody leaves!” Xiao Dee shouted. “I’ll show them what kind of crazy, fucked-up place this is—and they better like it!”

He went out into the dining room through the swinging door—his ponytail in that absurd pink ribbon possibly belonging to Spicy—and even after the door swung shut, they could still hear Little Brother from the kitchen. “You want to eat the best food you ever had, or do you want to
die
?” Xiao Dee was yelling.
“Asians
are dying, but you can eat well!” he screamed at the businessmen.