The Refugees(43)

“Don’t come back, Thomas,” she said. Over her shoulder, the television narrator was intoning about corporate pipelines and Nigerian strongmen. “You know it’s not good for either one of us.”

My father was waiting for me in the Ford, smoking a cigarette from the pack of Camels I’d left on the dash. The stereo was on, and because American music didn’t please him, he’d brought along a CD of melancholic ballads sung by Khanh Ly. He liked to say that whenever he listened to her, it might as well be 1969 all over again. I got into the car and turned off the stereo. The street was empty and quiet, except for the hum of traffic from La Cienega and the barking of a dog somewhere up the hill.

“That was a great idea,” I said.

He tossed the cigarette out the window. “So did she tell you who the man is?”

“She wouldn’t say.” I released the brake and eased the Ford into the street, lined with cars parked bumper to bumper. Halfway down the street, he said, “Stop.” Sam’s Toyota was next to us, pointing downhill with its wheels turned to the curb. The car was weathered and gray, and on the dusty rear window someone had drawn a frowning face.

“Kill the lights,” my father said. He waited until I turned them off before he slipped out his Swiss Army knife and got out of the car. After walking once around the Toyota, he knelt down and braced himself against the driver’s side wheel well with his left arm, the knife in his right hand. He drove the knife hard into the tire, working the short blade against the rubber for several seconds until the incision was several inches wide. If the knife made a sound when it came out of the tire, I didn’t hear it.

Once he’d repeated his work on the other three tires, he snapped the knife shut, stood up, and inspected the car with his hands on his hips. I looked over my shoulder, up and down the street, but the sidewalk was empty, and though some windows were lit with the blue glow of televisions, no one was looking out. When I turned back to the Toyota, my father was gone, and for a moment I’d thought he’d run away. But then he rose into my vision from the other side of the Toyota, a rock the size of a grapefruit in his hand. He hefted the rock over his head, paused to check his balance, and then hurled it at the car, throwing his whole body behind it. The windshield of the car cracked and buckled under the impact, but the sagging glass held, cradling the rock even as the echo bounced up and down the hill.

When he climbed back into the car, I said, “You’re crazy, you know that?”

“Just drive.” He spoke through gritted teeth. “Don’t turn on the lights until you get to the bottom of the hill.”

I waited until I turned the corner before I flipped on the headlights and accelerated. “I don’t know you.” I banged the wheel with my fist. “I don’t know why anyone would do something like that.”

“She’ll blame it on the blacks.”

All the cars around us had black drivers.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“So why didn’t you say something?” My father leaned his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. “You should have rolled down the window and stopped me. You could have honked your horn, made people come to their windows.”

We drove past the oil derricks, visible as shadows in the shape of gigantic pelicans nesting. Until Sam moved to Baldwin Hills, I hadn’t known Los Angeles even had oil. But I guess oil was to be found in every part of the world, just like anger and sorrow. A person only had to know where to look. I said, “No one has ever told you anything that would stop you, not from doing something you wanted.”

“That’s because everything I’ve ever done I believed in.” The car hit a bump on the entrance ramp to the Santa Monica Freeway, and he cursed, clasping his hand to his neck as if a bullet had grazed him.

“What’s wrong?”

He opened his eyes. “I think I pulled a muscle.”

“Serves you right.”

“You wouldn’t know right from wrong.” There was no trace of anger in his voice. “The only way a man knows right from wrong is when he makes a choice.”

“So was it right to cheat on Ma?” Far ahead of us, the sparse lights of downtown’s towers glittered. “Was it right to drive her to her grave the way you did? Do you believe you did the right thing?”

My father sighed the way he did all those mornings of my childhood when he came into the living room and saw us asleep, or pretending to be asleep, hoping he might forget to drag us out of bed. I waited for him to clip me on the ear or sucker punch me for what I said, but he didn’t. He kept quiet until we were driving through downtown, when he said, “I never loved your mother.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“But I respected her,” he continued. “She was dutiful. She was a good woman. My father chose her for me because she was a virtuous girl, even though he knew I loved someone else. And this is why I never chose any woman for you. I wanted you to find a woman you loved.”

“Don’t make this about me.”

“Who else is it about?”

He closed his eyes once more, and from downtown to the apartment, we didn’t speak again. When we reached his bedroom, I had to help him take off his shirt and lie down, holding him by the shoulders while he braced his neck and head. I saw the six-inch scar on his chest that I’d sometimes seen as a child, after he’d come out of the shower with a towel around his waist. Since he never told us anything about what he’d done in the war, we made up stories about how he’d been shot through the chest, or stabbed by the husband of one of his mistresses. The scar was a vivid bolt of red lightning in my memory, angled between his sternum and his heart, but in the dim light of his bedroom, it was only a pink zipper holding the rumpled, loose skin of his chest together.