The Refugees(41)

My father wasn’t yet a high school guidance counselor at that time. He was a night-shift janitor in a downtown office building and a part-time student at Cal State L.A. Wearing his janitor’s uniform, he made me walk him from our apartment to the other boy’s house, where I waited on the sidewalk as my father went up the stoop and knocked on the front door. The man who came onto the porch was taller than my father by six or seven inches, and wore a mechanic’s blue overalls unzipped to the bottom of his paunch. Curly brown hair sprouted from the back of his hands, and over the top of his T-shirt, and from his ears—everywhere except for the top of his head.

I didn’t hear what they said, both of them speaking in low, angry tones, until the moment the other father said, “Like hell I will.” My father kicked him in the groin without another word or warning, and, when the man doubled over, punched him in the throat. After the man fell facedown onto the porch, I saw his son standing behind the screen door, wide-eyed. My father didn’t bother looking behind him as he walked back toward me. There was no joy or excitement on his face as he put his hand on my shoulder, and for a moment I thought he was going to make me fight the man’s son. But all he did with that hand was to steer me home, gently patting me the entire way, saying nothing.

We picked up a rental car from the Enterprise lot in Los Feliz, a Ford the size of a golf cart and only a little more powerful. Then my father took me to his barbershop in old Chinatown, in an alley off Broadway, where a man with orange hair and a studded belt ran clippers through my hair and chuckled over his good times with the twenty-dollar whores in Saigon. After he was finished, I wasn’t sure which was uglier, the rented Ford or my haircut, so short I looked as if I’d been discharged from the army. I could feel the breeze on my scalp that evening, blowing in over Baldwin Hills to Sam’s doorstep. She had moved here after the divorce, to a town house on the heights above La Cienega, overlooking a field of oil derricks.

“This is a mistake,” I said.

He knocked on the door. “We haven’t seen her in a long time, and we’re just going to talk.”

My father had said we would have the advantage of sur-prise, even though we were on Sam’s territory. But he was getting old, because this was the extent of his plan to do something about me. He’d forgotten to reconnoiter or prepare for a worst-case scenario. Still, even if he had remembered, I don’t think he could have been prepared for the fact that when Sam opened the door, she would be wearing a maternity dress with ruffles of crepe-like material, making her swollen belly look like a pi?ata.

“Oh,” she said. Her hair was shorn into a blond pageboy, its brown roots showing. “You’re the last people I expected to see.”

“You’re pregnant,” I said.

“It’s kind of you to notice, Thomas. Hi, Mr. P.”

“Well,” my father said. “Look at you.”

“It’s good seeing you, too.” Behind her, someone was talking on the television in the living room. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you should have called.”

“We were just taking a drive,” I said. “And we thought we’d stop by.”

Sam knew my father and I never drove together just for fun, but she beckoned us in anyway. I expected another man to be there and entered cautiously, checking either side before stepping in. Stacks of student exams were arranged by grade on the avocado shag carpet, at the chrome feet of a couch made from fake black leather that we’d shopped for together in the Korean shops on Western Avenue. “Sorry for the mess,” Sam said, easing herself onto the couch.

My father occupied the armchair, and I was forced to sit on the far end of the couch from hers. I toed a stack of exams, one with a red “C” on the topmost sheet. “They’re not doing so well.”

“I think I’m losing my touch,” she replied.

People say a pregnant woman glows in a beautiful way with love and expectation. I’d always imagined this glow as a kind of aura, but the shine on Sam’s puffy face was only a reflection from a glaze of oil and sweat. “I’m not as energetic in the classroom as I usually am,” she went on. “It’s rubbing off on the students.”

“A teacher must lead by example,” my father remarked.

“So you’ve always said, Mr. P.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were tired. “If you’d like a beer, you can help yourself. Getting me up almost requires a crane.”

“You have beer?” I said.

“I keep it for guests.”

We should have refused out of politeness, but my father immediately went to the kitchen for the beer. Sam rested her hands on her belly and gave me a neutral look. “What have you been doing, Thomas?”

“Working. And sleeping.”

“Me, too.”

“My father moved in with me.”

She laughed. “That must be interesting. Who does the cooking?”

“He’s the cook, of course.” My father returned with two bottles of beer, a bowl of pretzels, and a glass of water. “The master of instant noodles.”

“Thanks, Mr. P,” Sam said when my father handed her the glass. “I need to cool down. I’m having a hot flash.”

We lapsed into silence and watched the show on television, about the cruelty of the meat industry’s practices. When my father broke the silence and complimented her on the house, Sam explained that most of the decorations belonged to her roommate, another teacher who was out for the night. My father pointed the tip of his beer bottle at the television, on top of which was a pipe, carved from teak and in the shape of a dragon with a ball of opium in its mouth. “From where did you buy that?”