Never Fall Down: A Novel (13 page)
Read Never Fall Down: A Novel Online
Authors: Patricia McCormick
Then blood is everywhere, all over Sojeat face, his shirt, the white cloth on the table. I do it; I do something to make it come. I see blood on my sneaker, like maybe I kick him in the face; but I don’t know. And people crying, Kate saying, “Oh no, oh no.” But ah, blood, I remember blood: how it smell, how it spread, how it make you like drunk, like wanting more and more and more; and the tiger in my heart, it roar now, one taste of blood and it want more. So I grab Sojeat on the neck and he grab me and rip my shirt and we fall, all the dish crashing, breaking, and Kate crying, and I run into the kitchen to find a long knife, and I see my arm raise in the air—so strong, so beautiful—this arm, this knife now will speak all the thing I can’t say.
And then the air, it all fly out of my body; something grab me so hard, something strong like jungle vine, it wrap around me and pull me down, down, down, more dish crashing, down to the carpet. On the ground next to me is Ravi, breathing hard and also crying, his arm around my waist. I look up and see all the family face looking down at me now from far away—Kate and Shirley, tear on the cheek, very scare, and Donna and Doug crying also. And I jump up and run out the door into the dark.
ONE SHOE GET CAUGHT IN THE DOOR WHEN I RUN, SO I KICK OFF
the other and run. Wearing only my pant, my shirt, rip at the shoulder, and no shoe, only sock, make me very cold in this New Hampshire nighttime. Cold and cover in blood, my white shirt soak with blood. Sojeat blood, my blood. Sticky and smell like iron, blood on your skin is something that soak in and never get out.
Peter family house on a mountain, no other house around, so where I run is all tree, very many, very close, like trapping you on every side. And now it rain, the raindrop hit the leaf like bullet, and the ground smell like rot. And now, to me, I’m in the jungle again.
So I do what I know how: I walk. I walk and walk and walk and walk, branch grabbing at me, slashing my face, until finally, the jungle clear and now I’m on a road. Very dark now, black, like deep pond, no bottom, so only way to follow this road is to feel with my sock. Like trance to walk now on this straight, flat road, only sound is my heart pounding like gun in my chest. Only thought in my mind now is how bad I am, how never can I tame the tiger in my heart, how only thing I can do is get far away from all these people I know—people I hate, like mean kid at school; people I love, like Peter; people who try to help me, like the speech teacher—because me, I am poison; I hurt everything I touch.
All a sudden I hear loud sound coming close on me from behind, and bright light, too, flash like bomb blast. I plunge myself sideway into the grass, and then a big wind roar by, so strong I think it will suck me inside. Then I understand. This wind, it’s a truck going by.
But still only thing for me to do is walk. Walk on the highway and think what to do. No way I can ever go back to Peter house again after this bad thing I did. And no way to get back to Cambodia. No matter how hard I think, is no way out. Until, finally, I feel my mind hoping.
Hoping for another truck to come. And hoping now to feel nothing anymore, no pain, no anger, no shame. No more kid teasing me at school, hive of bee calling me monkey; no more frustrate from a tongue that can’t say English, a tongue that can’t say what really in my heart. No more nightmare of corpse, of blood, of killing. Hoping only for truck, for feeling of tire, big fat truck tire, rolling over me, making me go away, disappear, no more Arn, only a black stain on this black road.
Then I see ahead is small village, all dark, all window black, everyone sleeping, traffic light even it just blink the eye very slow; and I feel sleepy, sleepy and wish only for my soft pillow, my soft bed at Peter house. I keep walking into this town, thinking of all these New Hampshire people—so warm inside their house, wrap in blanket, dreaming in their bed, dreaming their American dream of mall and McDonald—and me outside, teeth chattering, no idea what to do.
Flashing sign ahead says tv. This a word I know for sure. Sign also says free. This word I learn after the mall, so I know what’s for pay, what’s for free. Also a word I don’t know: motel. But I understand Free TV at this place, and my feet just go there. The door like magic, it open, slide apart, whoosh me inside. No TV, no people, only a counter and cash register like at the mall, but warm, warm like Cambodia, where air is like your own skin, so warm that I just lie down on the carpet and go to sleep.
I don’t know what time it is, but I feel people step around me, business shoe go past my head, shiny, black, very hurry these shoes; and I wake up, startle, a man yelling, “Get out! Get out!” I jump up, see now with clear eye my white shirt cover in blood, and run out the magic door into the cold again. Cold and still a little dark, gray, like the whole world is shadow. And foggy, also, like big cloud floating on the ground so you can’t see in front of you.
Into this cloud I step, my hand out in front so I can feel where to go, but I see only more fog, fog and shape of people. I see my sister, my little brother; I see people walking to the mango grove—the old music teacher, the prisoner with hands tied behind—people that been shot, people I kill, all ghost, floating, just floating by me.
Sound of walkie-talkie now, crackle with voice talking, and I see in this fog a police car. Police now come to shoot me, to kill me for all these bad thing I done, and I think: when the bullet hit, will I look like all the other people, where the begging stop, the hope die in their eye, and the calm come, the waiting? I wonder what the bullet will feel like when it hit: like relief? like joy? like nothing?
But the police, he doesn’t see me; he look right at me, not seeing me, and drive by. I laugh a little at him, laugh out loud. Stupid police. How he can find me if he stay inside the car? To hunt someone you have to get close, smell their sweat, not hide inside your big American car.
So now it my job to hunt him, to find him in this fog, to go to his gun, to call it to me, to bring the bullet into myself.
I step out from this cloud, and not too far away I see a red light flashing; police car is stop up ahead, and the police, he’s shining a flashlight around. I walk to this light, fast, no stopping, no time for thinking. The police, this time he see me; he point his light right in my eye.
“Don’t move,” he says.
I keep walking.
“Don’t move,” he put his hand on his gun. “Stop.”
I don’t stop; I walk to him, straight to him, closer, closer, until finally I can smell him, smell the coffee, the leather of his belt, the hair oil. I put my arm around him, lean my head on his chest. “Take me home,” I say. “Please.”
Peter, he wrap me in a blanket, crying. Shirley also crying, everyone crying except Sojeat; his face very swole, his eye still full of anger for me.
Peter take me to his room, close the door, and I get ready now for the beating. But Peter, he just hug me very tight, hold me very close long time, rock me side to side like a baby.
“Thank God, thank God,” he says.
How I can tell this guy, this guy who give me all this good thing, this guy who save my life, how I can tell him I think all the time about people who die, people I kill? He take me outta the camp, and I think I can leave all this death, leave all these people, leave them in Cambodia. How I can tell him they follow me here? How I can tell him, “You a nice man, Peter, but, me, I’m bad”? All I think is: I want to die. I want to kill.
“It hurt,” I say. The words in Khmer, they just come out.
Peter make a worry face. “What hurts?”
I point at my chest. “My heart. Like a tiger,” I tell him. My heart, like a tiger inside, clawing my rib to get out. So much hate in there it hurt. Hate for the people who kill my family, hate for the people who kill my friend, hate for myself.
“Why I live?” I ask Peter. “Why I live and so many people die?”
“I told you,” Peter says. “You’re the chosen one.”
I don’t understand.
“Arn, you’re the one who will tell everyone what happen in Cambodia,” he says.
“Why?” I ask him. “My family still dead, my friend still dead, my other friend still living in the camp.”
“You tell the story,” Peter says. “It’s a way to save people still in Cambodia, bring them to the US. But also to save yourself. Speaking out, telling the story, it’s a way to choose living. To say you are with the living now. Not the dead.”
This idea, it wrap around me like a warm blanket, it settle my shaking bone, it calm my heart, and I understand. All the time you fighting, you think only of how to survive. All the time you survive, you wonder why you don’t die. But now my life can be something different. Now, in America, I don’t have to fight. I don’t have to survive. I can chose a new thing: to live.
NEW YORK CITY 1984
I SWALLOW A BIG BREATH AND START. “MY NAME IS ARN,” I SAY.
“I’m from Cambodia.”
Big speech I’m giving. My own speech, not the one from Peter. Long time I work on learning English—ABC every morning with Shirley, every day with Pat, the special teacher at school—but mostly I learn it on TV,
Duke of Hazzard, A Team
. I learn it so much I even graduate New Hampshire high school. And now I get invite to speak at big church in New York City, St. John the Divine it call. Flowing with people. Ten thousand people, Peter say, with lotta VIP, like guy name Desmond Tutu and singer name of James Taylor and guy from
New York Time.
All waiting now for me to speak.
I start very slow, very careful. I tell a little about my life before the Khmer Rouge, about doing the twist with my brother, about frogging with Hong. Then I tell about how all the people have to leave the city, about the body at the side of the road, about being force to leave my family, probably all now dead. And then the story pour out of me, about the kid dying from no food, the ax hitting the skull, the people calling to me from the grave. And then something happen. The paper I hold, big splash of water on it, the word now dripping off the page. And my voice now, my careful American voice, it crack and break and die in my throat. Never have I cry, not one time, all these year. From eleven-year-old kid till now, not one tear. So many year, I think I kill off all the tear inside me. But after this long, dry season, now finally the rain.
Nice man who introduce me, he come to my side, ask me if I want to stop. I say no, I want to finish my speech. And now all the word come; they come not careful, they come with sob, my body shaking like a fever, with tear dripping off my nose, off my chin—my shirt, my collar now all soak through—until finally I finish.
A very great quiet now, hush in this audience, silence like after we play the first time for Khmer Rouge, waiting to see if we live, we die.
Then one applause. One more, then many, many hand all together clapping, so much applause like thunder, like the church, it roar from its bones, and oh, the sound, it lift me up, up high, like on top of a mountain, and I look out now and see all these people, American people—men and woman, boy and girl, even the guy from the
New York Time
—all these people crying, too.
And finally, the tiger in my heart, he lay down a moment and rest.
ARN CHORN-POND HAS BEEN SPEAKING OUT ABOUT THE
genocide in Cambodia ever since that day in 1984. As a representative of Amnesty International and a founder of Children of War he has traveled the world, shared the stage with rock stars such as Sting, Peter Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen. He’s met kings and presidents—including Jimmy Carter, whose wife, Rosalynn, visited his bedside in Thailand.
During the 1980s and ’90s, Arn returned to Cambodia many times—once to win the release of ten thousand hostages being held by Khmer Rouge holdouts. And he visited Cambodian refugees still living in camps in Thailand along with the princess of Cambodia, the woman he’d loved as a little boy, to teach the children traditional songs of their homeland.
In one of his visits home, where he organized hundreds of kids for a cleanup of the war debris in Phnom Penh, a woman approached him. It was his second oldest sister, Maly. Then, at a speech in Lowell, Massachusetts, where Arn was working with youth gangs, another woman came to the podium. It was his sister Jorami, who told him that their aunt had also survived. His aunt died soon after she and Arn were reunited. The rest of his family had perished.
Kha and Siv also survived; the other members of the musical troupe all disappeared or died. Runty was adopted by a family in Cambodia.
Sojeat and Ravi both live in the United States; Peter Pond’s family eventually adopted seventeen Cambodian children.
Sombo lives with his wife and children in the northern part of Cambodia, in an enclave where thousands of Khmer Rouge remain to this day. Koong, the boy Sombo carried to the Thai border, also survived and was adopted by a family in Canada.
Arn eventually reunited with all of them. But despite searching for nearly twelve years, he had been unable to find Mek. Then one day, on a visit to Battambang, Arn saw a destitute man in a lean-to by the road. It was Mek—who had been searching just as hard for Arn. He had arrived at the Thai refugee camp just days after Arn left for the United States.
Determined to help Mek return to his profession as a musician, Arn began to search for the few other master musicians who had survived the Khmer Rouge. Using funds he raised by speaking about his experiences, Arn founded Cambodian Living Arts in 1998. Today, CLA master musicians travel throughout Cambodia, teaching children the traditional music that would have otherwise been lost.
To learn more about Cambodian Living Arts, visit www.cambodianlivingarts.org.
OVER THE COURSE OF TWO YEARS, I SPENT COUNTLESS HOURS
with Arn Chorn-Pond—at my home during long, emotionally draining interviews; in New England, talking to his adoptive family; and in Cambodia, where we retraced virtually every step of his life during the three years, eight months, and twenty days of the reign of the Khmer Rouge.
With the help of a translator I interviewed Kha, Siv, Mek, and a number of Arn’s fellow survivors as well as “Missus Gotobed.” We even traveled to a remote part of the country still controlled by the Khmer Rouge, where we spent a day with Sombo. I asked Arn difficult, probing questions about his actions—the heroic and the horrific. I verified, as much as possible, the truth of his story.
Then I wrote his story as a novel. Like all trauma survivors, Arn can recall certain experiences in chilling detail; others he can tell only in vague generalities. For instance, he can describe the eerie
click
of a land mine being sprung and the hideous stink of a gangrenous leg. But he can’t remember the name of the little girl who lost her leg or when or where the attack took place. So I added to his recollections with my own research—and my own imagination—to fill in the missing pieces. The truth, I believe, is right there between the lines.
Sometimes, when Arn talks about his childhood, it’s as if he becomes that little boy all over again. He speaks with an urgency, a pure terror at times, that is palpable. But when he talks about the way music saved his life, about his work to preserve the traditional music of Cambodia, about his belief in the power of forgiveness—he is absolutely radiant.
Trying to capture that voice was like trying to bottle a lightning bug. Every time I imposed the rules of grammar or syntax on it, the light went out. And so, in telling Arn’s story I chose to use his own distinct and beautiful voice. The end result, I hope, captures the courageous and unforgettable person he is.
