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Six

Sno jumped back from the man and his knife. "Like, who are you?" she asked, panting. "What's your problem? Are you some kinda pervert or something?"

"Shut up," the man said, lunging for her. "Shut up and commere."

She could turn. She could run. But he was a tall man with long legs, and she was wearing a skirt. He could catch her in an even race.

"No," she said. "Uh-uh. I'm not making it easy for you. Look, mister, I don't know who you are or how you got the letter or why you picked on me, but you got a helmet on, I can't see your face. Just leave me alone and this never happened, okay?" He feinted at her and she jumped back, trembling. The fact that she was able to talk at all she attributed to feeling as if she was watching something on TV happen to somebody else.

"Give it up, little girl," the man said gruffly. "You got nowhere to run to, know what I mean? I can make it so you never feel a thing. I don't like hurting little girls, but you've seriously annoyed somebody with connections. That tends to be fatal, in my cultural milieu. So don't make me slash you to death, okay?"

He lunged again and Sno, who had not found his speech at all reassuring, jumped behind the bike and shoved it toward him.

He leaped back, then sprinted over the bike and caught her wrist. Without thinking, she grabbed his wrist with her other hand and threw him. Her judo lessons had finally come in handy. He lay there on the ground, staring up at her while she stared back at him, both of them unable to believe that she had actually decked him. Then she took to her heels and ran like hell.

 

* * * 

 

Deep in the forest at that time there dwelled a group of former soldiers, all grown much older than they had been in the war, though no less troubled by all that they had seen and heard and done. They had come to the forest to do a sweat lodge and a lot of drumming, trying to bring peace to their spirits, if not to the forest. There were seven of them, these veterans, and they were called Doc, Doper, Chief, Red-Eye, Dead-Eye, Drifty and Trip-Wire. Originally there were eight but the eighth, the African-American sergeant known for his stealth in ambush as Sneaky-Pete, had taken a job as a personal security officer for an internationally famous dance troupe of former inner-city children from Detroit who were currently performing at a dance festival in Port Townsend, Washington. So he couldn't make it.

Doc was out chopping wood that morning while Doper and Chief were down at the river catching breakfast. They had the cabin for two weeks and had only been here for a couple of days. It was pretty well hidden. The cabin was accessible by road most of the way, until the route to the camp took off onto an overgrown side road that had been washed out by a feeder stream, leaving a huge ravine that had to be carefully negotiated, then the stream forded, in a pack trip that took an hour or two. This time of year, with the snowfall frequent and the roads plowed much less often, the place was fairly remote. It wasn't so remote, however, that any of them felt foolish about not registering with the Park Service, especially since the register had disappeared, along with the Park Service building that used to be there just before you reached the Shuksan campground. Besides, they weren't doing anything dangerous or illegal, they had plenty of winter gear and lots of fuel and they all needed time together away from civilization.

They hadn't known each other in-country. Hadn't even been in the same place at around the same time. Doc had served two tours early in the war as a medic, one tour largely in the Central Highlands with the Montagnard tribesmen, one taking classified hikes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail where it skirted Laos and Cambodia, with several also classified forays into those countries for a variety of classified reasons he still had trouble confronting. He'd spent a lot of the time since he'd been back getting drunk or high and getting over getting drunk or high, being in bad relationships, getting good jobs, jobs he loved, where people thought highly of him until he inevitably freaked out. Then he walked into his first vet center, talked to the counselor, participated in rap sessions and started working on his counseling degree while volunteering at the center himself. Now he was a full-fledged counselor, but this wasn't exactly a center-sponsored activity. This was something he was doing for himself, with friends.

Getting away. Clean air and water, beautiful scenery, snow, wood to chop, fires to build, singing and drumming, thinking, praying, talking to other guys, purifying himself in the sweat lodge. It had been great for the weekend. But something restless and dissatisfied inside himself, the cynical, asshole part that had controlled him totally when he drank, was sneering, "Okay. Been there. Done that. Now what?" Be still, he told himself, be still and experience this. Then he heard the screams and tore off like a round from an AK-47.

 

* * *

 

Magic Flute

Taking money from street people like Dico Miller was only practice for bigger and better things, Nguyen Ding Hoa assured the Guerillas as the gang gathered on the fire escape of Ding's building and smoked the profits of their morning's labors.

The Guerillas blew smoke rings and nodded, cool. Like Ding, many of them wore their straight black or dark brown hair long, with a kerchief tied around their foreheads like an Indian headband. They were laughing and joking about the expressions on people's faces—the little black dude had about cried when they'd taken the money they'd just seen the woman give him. A ten! Most of those people didn't get that much all day.

Ding was doing a humorous impression of the poor geek when the window to his parents' apartment banged open and his mother's face appeared in the opening. "Ding," she said. "La dei."

"In a minute, Mom," he said.

"Now," his mother said firmly. She stood only four feet eight and weighed less than eighty pounds, but every ounce of her was made of steel springs.

"I'm with the gang, Mom," he said.

"You come," she said. He sometimes ignored her and his father. He would have liked to now, with his head light from the weed he'd been smoking and his friends giggling and looking on. But one glance at his mother's set face and he knew now was not going to be one of those times.

"Later, dudes," he said.

Le groaned. "Oh, man, you're not going to go . . ."

"Got to. Mom hasn't been feeling good. I better see if she needs me to get her something."

"Give her a hit of this, man," Huong suggested, holding out the joint.

"Hunh," Ding snorted in appreciation. He took the joint, then turned his back on the guys to climb in the window, blocking his mother's face from the gang and the gang from her.

"So, what's so important?" he asked her, when they were well away from the window.

"You!" she said, giving him a sharp one-handed shove that, although he towered over her, sent him reeling back into the living room, while all the time cursing him in Vietnamese. "You steal from beggars to buy drugs!"

"Mom, it wasn't like that, okay?" he replied in English, then switched to Vietnamese, "It's not like it's real drugs, just a little hash, like you had in Vietnam . . ."

His mother pushed him again and he sat down abruptly on the dilapidated foam futon that served as both a couch and his bed. She actually spat at him. "You who have had every chance are behaving like trash! Your father and I are both of good families. You think all he does is sweep out stores, but he was a doctor! Even when we were refugees, we did not steal. We worked. And we certainly didn't steal from beggars. You behave like a common shoeshine boy, roaming the streets and stealing! Is it for this we came to America, so our son could become a thief? Better we had all died under the communists. Better we had died in the refugee camps!"

"Mother, these street bums just have money given to them. They grew up here with everything. Most of them never had a war or the camps. They can share a little. We bust our asses in this country and get nowhere because the Americans are so afraid of Asian kids being smarter and more ambitious than they are. You saw how it was with me. I couldn't get into the university."

"No, but you got into jail! We save you from prison in Vietnam, we bring you from the camps, and you go to jail here."

"Jail here is better than the camps, Mom. The people have so much and they won't share . . ."

"The UN doctor shared," his mother reminded him. "And the church group. And you used to share too, my son. You were a better person when you had nothing."He closed his mouth and turned his face to the wall until she hurried off to her job. By that time it was raining harder than the usual Seattle drizzle and the gang had dispersed. He didn't feel like calling them back again.

He sat astride the duct-taped, patched vinyl seat of the rickety kitchen chair watching the rain run down the crack in the window and relit the joint. As he got quietly stoned, his mother's words and the disappointment and anger in her face stabbed through the smoke and through his own bitterness. Maybe he should have died in the camps, but somebody had promised him a chance.

It had been raining like this that day, another long dreary day in monsoon season, and he'd carried his rice bowl away from the quonset hut where his parents and the other adults squatted, eating their rice. The rain gushed through holes in the tin roof and beat so loudly that it sounded like a thousand drums.

Talking of their home, of the war, of family that was left behind and of what would become of the young people, talking of their bowels and their teeth and their skin diseases, the adults shouted in piercing voices between carefully savored nibbles of rice.

Ding could not bear it that day. The constant din of rain made him feel as if he wanted to peel off his skin and run screaming through the barbed wire, but the cold and the dankness made his bones ache and his toes and hands and balls shrivel and shrink.

When he grew old here, what would he talk about? How it was during the early days in the camp?

He went to find his gang and eat with them. He had another gang in those days, his first gang, his friends, boys he had grown up with. Several of them had gone by then—Dao and Phuong had died earlier in the month from the fever that spread before the UN health officials came with their shots, several of the other guys were in the hospital, and Linh, the lucky devil, had been shipped out with his family to America. There had been talk that soon the Hong Kong government was going to return them all to Vietnam and turn them over to the communist government. It wouldn't be so hard on the ones who had no parents. The communists would train them to do something, take care of them, maybe give them jobs, but his parents would be punished, perhaps killed, if they had done even half what they claimed to help the Americans. Ding had not wanted to return to Vietnam. Not even if they made him president. He wanted to see America. He would make a good American, he would learn to drive a car and play a guitar and wear clothes same like the doctors from Seattle and Portland who had come with the UN. One of them sang a song all the time he was examining people and giving shots and Ding sang it to himself as he hunched over his rice, sheltering under the branches of a tree that overhung the barbed wire. He couldn't remember much of it, and began humming a Vietnamese song instead as he dipped into his rice bowl.

That was when he'd heard her.

"Please, son, share your meal with an old lady?" a tiny pathetic voice had whined near his elbow. He looked down and saw a wizened little woman with betel-blackened teeth staring up at him through cataract-clouded eyes.

"Where's your own rice bowl, Auntie?" he asked. His parents had taught him to treat every elderly person as if he or she were his own grandparent. His grandparents, of course, were lost long ago in Vietnam.

The old woman too had had her losses.

"My son died last week and gang toughs stole it from me with no strong son to protect me. Please. I'm very weak."

"Who stole it from you, Auntie?" he asked.

"Boys," she said. "Big strong boys like you, like my son. They've eaten it all. You can't get it back."

"No, but you will need your bowl. Here, you eat mine and I'll go settle with them." Part of him just wanted a fight.

She took his bowl and ate the rice hungrily, saying, "No. Don't go. It is enough that I eat now. You're a kind young man. And musical. Didn't I hear you singing?"

"Yes."

"What was that song?"

He told her the name of the Vietnamese song he had been singing, but she said, "No, the other one. Was that an American song?"

"Yes, Bac Si Baker from Seattle sang it always and I learned it from him."

"What is it? It is very strange."

Ding had known nothing then, nothing about music, nothing about America. He had told her, "It is the story of Lou-Le Lou-Ly but I cannot make out the words. When the Colonel remembers the work of my mother and sends for us to come to America, I will learn the meaning," he said, but he knew he was boasting. The Colonel didn't remember his mother. She had only been a secretary.

"Yes, that is so," the old woman said. "You sing well. Do you play any instruments?"

Ding laughed a bitter laugh. "Where would I find an instrument here?"

"I have here a bamboo flute," the old woman said, with-drawing a slender pipe from her rags. "It is a worthless thing, except for the music it makes.""How do you play it?"

"You blow softly—here—and finger the notes, like this," she said, and played back to him the Vietnamese tune he had been singing. "Would you like to try?"

"Yes," he said. And after only a couple of false tries, he played "Lou-Le Lou-Ly." When he finished playing the tune, he turned to the old auntie, grinning with happiness at his success.

Funny. What happened next he had never thought twice about until today, but simply accepted. He hadn't had anything to smoke then, he knew, but maybe he'd been delirious from hunger. He'd questioned things less back then, which was just as well.

For the old auntie had gone, and in her place was a beautiful lady, shining and smiling and he knew without asking that she was the goddess of mercy, Kwan Yin. He had heard his father describe her sometimes, and this was just how she should look. Lotus in one hand, jewel in another, flowing silken robes that did not dampen with the rain.

He wasn't sure if he was supposed to bow or grovel in the mud or what, but as he started to kneel she said, "No, no. The flute is a magic one. It is good for a wish. This wish I give to you because you kindly shared your rice with a hungry elder."

"I wish my family and I would go to America," he said.

"Tell the flute," she said.

He played his American song again, and when he looked back, she was gone. He was not sure how else to wish to go to America, so that day he went around to all of the elders, asking them to tell him what they remembered of the Americans, especially if they remembered songs. Some remembered snatches, which he played on his flute. People were pleased to hear the music.

The next day, a letter from a Seattle church group came saying that the group was sponsoring Ding's family to move to Seattle.

Ding threw the remainder of the joint on the floor and crushed it with his toe, disgusted. Cheap shit. It was supposed to help you mellow out, forget, not remember.

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