The Refugees(14)
In the days and nights that passed, my mother never brought up Mrs. Hoa, but the woman had unsettled her. My mother began talking during our evening bookkeeping, a time when she was usually completely focused on calculating the daily receipts. We worked at the dining table, counting cash, rolling coins into paper packages the size of firecrackers, and stamping the New Saigon’s address onto the back of the personal checks, the Monopoly-money food stamps, and the yellow coupons from Aid to Families with Dependent Children. When I added the sums with a humming mechanical calculator bigger than our rotary telephone, I never needed to look at the keypad. I knew every number’s place by heart. It would be the only time I was ever good at math.
As we did the day’s reckoning, my mother reported on the rumors of former South Vietnamese soldiers organizing not only a guerrilla army in Thailand but also a secret front here in the United States, its purpose to overthrow the Communists. Grimmer than rumors was how unknown assailants had firebombed a Vietnamese newspaper editor’s office in Garden Grove (he died), while another editor had been shot to death, along with his wife, in the doorway of their house in Virginia (the murderers were never caught). “They just said in public what a lot of people already say in private,” my mother said, wetting her fingers on a sponge. “Making peace with the Communists might not be such a bad thing.”
I wrote down figures in a ledger, never looking up. My father and I worked in T-shirts and shorts, but my mother wore only a nightgown of sheer green fabric without a bra. She wasn’t aware of how her breasts swayed like anemones under shallow water, embarrassing me whenever I saw those dark and doleful areolas with their nipples as thick as my index finger. My mother’s breasts were nothing like those of the girls in my class, or so I imagined in fantasies that had been confirmed the week before when I had seen Emmy Tsuchida’s nipple through the gap between two buttons of her shirt, pink and pert, exactly like the eraser on the pencil in my hand. Without raising my gaze from the ledger, I said, “But you always tell me the Communists are bad people.”
“O-ho!” my father said with a chortle. “So you do pay attention. Sometimes I can’t tell what’s going on behind those thick glasses of yours.”
“The Communists are evil.” My mother riffled through a stack of twenty-dollar bills. She had never finished grade school, her father forcing her to stay at home to care for her siblings, and yet she could count money by hand and add figures in her head more quickly than I could on the calculator. “There’s no doubt about it. They don’t believe in God and they don’t believe in money.”
“But they believe in taking other people’s money,” my father said. He spoke often of his auto parts store, which according to his brothers no longer had any parts to sell under Communist ownership. We had lived above the store, and sometimes I wondered if a Communist child was sleeping in my bed, and if so, what kinds of books a Red read, and what kind of movies he saw. Captain America was out of the question, but he must have seen Luke Skywalker crossing light sabers with Darth Vader. I had seen Star Wars a dozen times on videotape, and if anyone was so deprived as to have not watched it even once, then the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution. But my mother would not have agreed. She wrapped a paper band around the twenties and said, “I hate the Communists as much as Mrs. Hoa, but she’s fighting a war that can’t be won. I’m not throwing away my money on a lost cause.”
My father ended the conversation by standing and sweeping the cash, coins, checks, and food stamps into the vinyl satchel he carried every morning to the Bank of America. My parents kept some of their profits in the bank, donated a portion to the church, and wired another percentage to the relatives in Vietnam, who periodically mailed us thin letters thick with trouble, summed up for me by my mother to the tune of no food and no money, no school and no hope. Their relatives’ experiences and their own had taught my parents to believe that no country was immune to disaster, and so they secreted another percentage of the profits at home, just in case some horrendous calamity wiped out the American banking system. My mother wrapped blocks of hundred-dollar bills in plastic and taped them underneath the lid of the toilet tank, buried dog-tag-sized ounces of gold in the rice, and stashed her jade bracelets, twenty-four-karat gold necklaces, and diamond rings in a portable fireproof safe, hidden in the crawl space underneath the house. To distract thieves, she devised decoys, placing a large glass vase heavy with coins high on a bookshelf by the front door, and a pair of gold bracelets on top of her dresser.
Her fear of robbery was proved justified last October, when, on an otherwise forgettable Tuesday evening, someone knocked on the door. My father was in the kitchen, having just turned on the stove, and I reached the door a few steps ahead of my mother, already in her nightgown. When I peered through the peephole, I saw a white man who said, “I got mail for you, sir.” If he had spoken in Vietnamese or Spanish, I never would have unlocked the door, but because he spoke English, I did. He used his left hand to push his way into the house, a young man in his twenties with feathered hair the color of old straw, long enough to brush the collar of his frayed jeans jacket. Not much taller than my mother, he was slightly built; when he spoke, his voice squeaked like rubber soles on a gym floor.
“Get back,” he said. His forehead was slick with sweat, and in his right hand was a gun. Even with the passage of decades, I can still see that gun clearly, a black-barreled .22 revolver that he waved before him with a trembling hand as he stepped past the threshold, kicking at the jumble of shoes we kept there and forgetting to close the door. My mother concluded later that he was an amateur, perhaps an addict desperate for money. He pointed the gun past me, at her, and said, “You understand English? Get on the floor!”