The Refugees(8)
He’d known them since he was eight, when he began picking through their garbage dumps for tin and cardboard, well-worn Playboy magazines, and unopened C rations. The GIs taught him the rudiments of English, enough for him to find a job years later in Saigon, sweeping the floor of a tea bar on Tu Do Street where the girls pawned themselves for dollars. With persistence, he sandpapered the two discourses of junkyard and whorehouse into a more usable kind of English, good enough to let him understand the rumor passed from one foreign journalist to another in the spring of ’75, six months ago. Thousands would be slaughtered if the city fell to the Communists.
In April, when rockets and mortars began exploding on the outskirts of the city, the rumor seemed about to come true. Although he hadn’t planned on kicking, shoving, and clawing his way aboard a river barge, he found himself doing so one morning after he saw a black cloud of smoke over the airport, burning on the horizon, lit up by enemy shellfire. A month later he was in Camp Pendleton, San Diego, waiting for sponsorship. He and the other refugees had been rescued by a Seventh Fleet destroyer in the South China Sea, taken to a makeshift Marine Corps camp at Guam, and then flown to California. As he lay on his cot and listened to children playing hide-and-seek in the alleys between the tents, he tried to forget the people who had clutched at the air as they fell into the river, some knocked down in the scramble, others shot in the back by desperate soldiers clearing a way for their own escape. He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.
None of this was mentioned in the airmail he posted to his parents, soon after coming to Parrish’s house. It was his second letter home. In June, at Camp Pendleton, he’d dispatched his first airmail care of the resettlement agency. In both cases, assuming no letter would go unread by the Communists, he wrote only of where he lived and how to get in touch with him. He was afraid of endangering his family by marking them as relatives of someone who’d fled, and he was even more afraid the letters might never make it home at all. The only time his family’s fate wasn’t on his mind was during those few seconds after he woke up, in a warm bed under three blankets, remembering dreams in which he spoke perfect English. Then he opened his eyes to see a faint blue glow filtered through foggy windows, the murky and wavering shimmer reminding him of where he was, in a distant city, a foreign place where even the quality of light differed from the tropical glare he’d always known.
Downstairs, he would find Parrish and Marcus eating breakfast and discussing the local news, international politics, or the latest film. They bickered often, usually in a bantering way, about whether or not they should vote for Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, or whether Ford’s would-be assassin, a San Francisco woman, should get life or death.
When they began arguing seriously in front of him, he knew he was becoming a part of their household. Sometimes the fights seemed to occur for no reason, as happened one morning in October after Parrish asked about the date of Marcus’s final exams. “Why don’t you take them for me?” Marcus snapped before stalking out of the kitchen. Parrish waited until Marcus ran up the stairs before he leaned over to Liem and said, “It’s the terrible twos. The second year’s the hardest.”
“Oh, yes?” Liem nodded his head even though he was uncertain, once again, about what Parrish meant. “I see you both yell many times.”
“Even though he’s older, he’s not as mature as you,” Parrish said. He stirred his coffee, his spoon making figure eights instead of circles. “He hasn’t seen the things you or I have. Of course, when I was his age, I was spoiled and a little lazy too. But I’m better now. My ancestors made their money from means of which I’m ashamed, but there’s no reason why I can’t put my own to some good use. Is there?”
“No?”
“No,” Parrish said. Liem understood he was one of the good uses for the money Parrish had earned in two decades as a corporate accountant, a job he’d given up a few years before to work in environmental protection. Although Parrish refused to let Liem pay rent, Liem had found a job anyway. The week after his arrival, he’d wandered through downtown until he came across a liquor store in the heart of the Tenderloin, on the corner of Taylor and Turk. “Help Wanted” was scrawled in soap on the window next to “Se Habla Espa?ol.” The book he carried in his pocket, Everyday Dialogues in English, had no scenarios featuring the duo patrolling the corner outside the store, so he said nothing as he brushed by the shivering prostitute with pimples in her cleavage, who dismissed him at a look, and the transvestite with hairy forearms, who did not.
His shift ran from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, six days a week, his day off on Thursday. He swept the floor and stocked the shelves, cleaned the toilet and wiped the windows, tended the register and then repeated the routine. During downtime, he read his book, hoping for clues on how to talk with Marcus and Parrish, but finding little of use in chapters like “Juan Gonzalez Visits New York City and Has to Ask His Way Around,” or “An Englishman and an American Attend a Football Game.” At the end of his shift, he dragged two garbage bags to a Dumpster down an alley where people with questionable histories urinated and vomited when it was dark, and sometimes when it wasn’t. No matter how much he scrubbed his hands afterward, he sensed they’d never really be clean. The grease and garbage he dealt in had worked their way into his calluses so deeply he imagined that he was forever leaving his fingerprints everywhere.