Tiger Girl (17 page)

“Hey, that's assault. You can't do that,” I said.

“Who says I can't?”

“ACLU. This is a public space. We were peaceably assembled. Now we're going back to our car. You can't just physically strike someone. That's assault.”

The man stepped into a yellow puddle of light from one of the lights in the parking lot. He was bald and barrel-chested, wearing a suit jacket and a silky shirt open at the neck. I couldn't tell if he was white or a very pale brown man. “What's all this AC-DC IOU shit?”

“It's okay, man, we're leaving, we're leaving. Just my little cousin. She's in college is all. You know how crazy those college girls talk,” Sitan stepped between me and the sweaty bald guy.

“You better clear your ass out,” he said to Paul. Then he glared at me and actually raised a fist and shook it. “As for you, smart-mouth—”

“You touch me and I'll press charges! I'll call my lawyer! See how you like that! You can't go around hitting people! That's against the law!”

“This is my business, smarty-pants. I can do what I want.” The man punched his fist into his palm.

“You touch me, I'll sue you!”

Sitan was dragging me across the parking lot. “Hurry up,” he said.

“You could go to jail!” I shouted over my shoulder. “See how you like that!”

Paul hurriedly unlocked the doors of his Mazda, and Sitan pushed me in the front seat, then he scrambled over me, his knees in my face, and landed with a thump in the back seat. Paul hit the gas, and the tires squealed against the asphalt as we tore off down the street toward the highway.

“What's the matter with you?” Paul muttered.

“What's the matter with
me
? What's the matter with your asshole friend? It's totally illegal to threaten to hit people.”

Sitan peered out the back window as though he expected cars to come chasing after us.

“So you worked in that club?” I asked, calming down a little. I fastened my seatbelt. “You a bouncer or a bartender?”

“Neither. He was my supplier.”

I sat back with a hollow feeling in my gut.

Sitan whistled from the back seat. “Don't go messing with those people.”

“I'm clean now. I'm not going back to that life.”

“Then why did you go back to that club if you knew your ‘dealer' was there?” My heart was pounding in my ears.

“I needed to talk to someone.”

“That woman?” Then I corrected myself. “I mean, that guy?”

“No, someone else. Her friend.”

I knew I should tell Uncle about all this, the drug dealing, the search for a missing woman in
his old dealer's
club, but part of me worried that Uncle wouldn't want to hear what I would have to say. And bad news could have a way of boomeranging on the messenger. There was a lot of bad news Ma hadn't wanted to hear over the years when I was growing up. Part of me felt weary. Was it still worth fighting the way I had as a child?

Sitan was laughing from the back seat.

“This isn't funny!” I said.

“Shut up! Both of you!” Paul slammed his fist against the dashboard. Then he picked up the speed, tailgating again.

Great, I thought. We were going to get in an accident for sure.

Paul turned on the radio, and we listened to bad, loud pop all the way back to our exit to Santa Bonita.

When we got back to the apartment, Uncle was nowhere to be found. There was a note in his spidery cursive anchored to the kitchen table with a grapefruit: “Glad you have a fun time together! This is special Ruby Red. Try it for breakfast.”

It seemed early for him to have gone back to the donut shop, but Sitan didn't seem worried. “He stays with friends sometimes,” Sitan said. “Back when I needed a place to stay, he used to let me stay here, and he stayed somewhere else.”

“What do you mean? What friends? Where?” I asked.

But Sitan shrugged. “Don't worry. It's just the way he is sometimes.”

“Have you noticed all the Sudafed he's taking?” I asked, since Sitan seemed to want to be the expert on Uncle. “And the Nicorette? When did he start smoking?”

Sitan shook his head.

“I think there's something wrong. He didn't used to be this way.”

“Nothing used to be this way,” Paul interjected. He was pacing around the apartment, taking long strides from the kitchenette to the front door, from the bookshelf to the opposite wall, as though he were measuring. “The old world ended. Back to Year Zero. Don't you remember?”

I ignored him. “Sitan, Uncle seems to like you very much. He obviously trusts you. You must have known him for a while. Do you think he's behaving rationally?”

Sitan picked up the grapefruit and tossed it from hand to hand. “You sound like an old woman.”

“You sound like a jerk.”

Paul stepped between us. “Hey, how about a smoke?” He held up a joint.

“If Uncle comes back, he'll smell it.”

He and Sitan smirked, but then decided to go smoke on the fire escape. They slipped out the front door while I rummaged in the refrigerator for something to make for dinner. I turned on the TV, but Uncle didn't get cable and there wasn't much on—a sitcom, a medical drama, an animated Christmas special with singing animals, and an episode of
Cops
. I turned off the TV and ate my leftovers in silence, watching the occasional headlights pull into the parking lot, the shadows of a mulberry tree dance across the far wall, the flicker of shadow and light against the drapes. Life in California wasn't glamorous the way I'd imagined. I could believe it would be a lot like life at home if I stayed—working around the clock in the family business, trying to find time to study if I went to school here—only it would be lonelier. I'd moved so many times, how could I have forgotten this empty feeling of being far from any friends? I realized I hadn't thought out this trip very well at all.

Around midnight, Paul and Sitan returned, smelling of smoke and the pizza they'd ordered and shared.

Sitan grabbed my pillows off the sofa, stretched out on the floor, and fell asleep almost immediately, but Paul continued to pace.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I wish
Mai
were still alive,” he said. “I always thought she must have died in Cambodia.”

I didn't tell him that part of her did, and that the woman who'd made it to America was nothing like the mother he remembered. I said simply, “She missed you.”

“Did she say what she thought happened to me? Did she say where she thought the soldiers took me?” His voice was angry.

“Nobody knew where you went. She could only hope you were still alive.”

“Ha,” he said, and the anger in his voice made me realize he might blame our mother for not taking care of him, for not having protected him. It wasn't rational, but the way he held his face, his features squeezed together now, made me think of a child trying not to cry, not a twenty-five-year-old man thinking about the past.

Then Paul began to tell me his own story, how he and his best friend survived under the Khmer Rouge. We all had such stories, each one different and the same. “If not for him, I would be dead. He was like my brother. We were the only family we had.” He spoke in his beautiful Khmer, the grammar perfect, like our mother's, like our father's. I couldn't follow everything he said at first, I wasn't used to the vocabulary, but then as I listened, I found I understood more and more, the language sliding into a corner in my brain that I hadn't known existed.

When he was eleven, the soldiers took my brother from the rest of the family and sent him to a camp for young men. Some of the boys were trained as soldiers, the so-called Old People, the ones who'd grown up in the countryside their whole lives and were considered the most “pure.” They were uninfluenced by the city's foreign elements, uneducated, and unable to contradict the Khmer Rouge's new version of Cambodian history. As one of the former City Boys, my brother was one of the New People. He was among those forced to work the hardest, digging drainage ditches for a road the soldiers wanted to build.

Later, the City Boys were sent into the mountains to help build a road. He had to hack through the jungle, clearing brush and vines and earth away in metal buckets on a pole slung over his shoulders. Many of the City Boys grew sick in the jungle, coughing in the cold night air, shivering from fevers, doubling over from the crippling diarrhea. Then, one by one, they died. Sometimes they were criticized for small errors—falling, tripping, dropping a bucket. Often they were beaten by the soldiers for no reason at all. One day several of the Country Boys accused a City Boy of something. It wasn't clear what he'd done wrong. They said he'd complained about the hard work. They said he was only pretending to be injured. But who would dare to complain? Who would dare to malinger? The City Boy and his entire group of friends were led away into the jungle, and my brother never saw them again. He knew from his previous work camp that boys who were led off were generally killed, their bodies left to rot in the sun and feed the large black birds that circled in the sky, thick as the smoke of a funeral pyre.

At night my brother huddled together with his best friend, Arun. They didn't dare talk about the past anymore, their lives as classmates in Phnom Penh. They'd long ago decided on their story. They were war orphans, American bombs had fallen on their villages, their relatives had taken them to the capital's shanty towns to escape, and they'd lived as beggars. They could describe the slums from their experience crocodile hunting. If anyone asked about their accents, they'd shrug. They'd had to learn to speak like City Boys or they couldn't beg for work, for food, for money.

In the first camp, they were lucky. Some of the Country Boys liked to hear them talk about life in the city. What did the buildings look like? What kind of food did the city people eat? Did you ever see the King's palace? Did you see the dancing
girls? Were they pretty? How pretty? Some of the Country Boys sat rapt and wide-eyed, listening to the tales of a life they'd only dreamed about before the Khmer Rouge took over. But Paul and Arun had to be careful so that the
chhlops
didn't hear them. Those children trained as spies would have turned them all in to the older men, who'd have killed them for talking about the pre-revolutionary past.

Arun was a good storyteller. He could remember the plot of every movie he'd ever seen. The other boys particularly liked the story of the snake spirit who pretended to be a beautiful woman so that she could marry an unsuspecting farmer. One night the husband followed his wife to a forest lake where she liked to bathe in privacy. He watched from behind a large boulder as she took off her clothes and stepped into the clear water, the moonlight shining like silver against her skin. Mesmerized by her beauty, he had climbed onto the rock so that he could watch her swim, when, in the bright silver light of the moon, he saw her reflection on the surface of the water, shiny as a mirror. He saw the face of a medusa, her hair coiling with snakes. He ran home terrified, unsure what the vision had meant. Nine months later when their first child was born, the little girl emerged with tiny snakes for hair. Horrified, he accused his wife of being a demon, and she slithered away to a cave, never to be seen again.

He remembered the plots of Hong Kong movies with flying Chinese swordsmen spinning through the air as they fought with villains, rescuing entire villages from masked bandits, demons who shot fire out of their hands, and wicked officials who stole from the poor. He could recount the complicated plots of Indian movies with bandits, star-crossed lovers, motorcycles, car chases, dance interludes, and beautiful, red-lipped women who sang in the sweet, high voices of little girls.

Sometimes the village boys would trade a little of their rice rations to hear another movie recounted from beginning to end.

But in the next camp, the work was harder, death felt closer, and the rice was less than a tight fistful for the entire work crew of boys. They filled their stomachs with the dirty water that was served instead of soup. They kept stones in their mouths all day, sucking on them, rolling them against their dry tongues, trying to keep the dreadful feeling of hunger at bay. To show weakness was to ask for death. Dying might not have been so bad, but the soldiers had taken to cutting out the organs of the men and boys they killed, boiling them as soup, drinking the gall of human bladders, sharing the livers of the dying as meat.

At night, he and Arun had smelled the scent of burning flesh on the wind.

“If they come for us,” Arun had whispered in the night, while they lay on the hard ground, the sounds of the jungle's beasts carried on the wind, the sound of the others boys' breathing filling the night around them, “if they try to take us away, I'll kill you first.”

My brother had been grateful. “If they come for us, we'll run fast, so they'll have to shoot us,” he said.

The thought of dying together quickly was a consolation. It was enough to sustain my brother. It helped him to endure, to keep living, knowing that he had such a loyal friend in the whole dark world. Better than a brother.

Their chance for escape came when the Vietnamese army invaded in December of 1979. They woke one morning to the sound of men shouting and an engine turning over, roaring to life. The soldiers were fleeing the camp. They'd received word from Angkar, and they were firing up the trucks and heading inland, trying to escape before the Vietnamese arrived.

All the boys ran along the road, unsure of what was happening and where they should go.

When the army actually arrived, they killed everyone in their path. Arun and my brother hid under the bodies they found alongside the road until the soldiers passed. Then they fled into the jungle at night, eating leaves to survive.