The Weight of Our Sky(23)
Look how happy that Chinese pig is, the Djinn whispers. If that’s how he treats innocent animals, how do you think he’d treat people he actually hated?
Shut up, I tell him, shut up, shut up. I say it three times to be safe, and hate myself for doing it.
“And the radios?” Uncle Chong asks. I can hear the whisper of steel in his words, but Frankie, oblivious, rattles on. “Well, the houses were all empty; their windows were all smashed in and everything. So I went in and saw all this stuff, and I grabbed these two radios. Now Vince and I can have one each!” He grins, victorious, as happy as a child.
Before we can react, Auntie Bee is striding across the room. The harsh crack her hand makes as it comes into contact with Frankie’s cheek echoes through the room; her palm leaves a red mark on his pale skin. He steps back, his face stunned.
“You make me ashamed to call you my son,” his mother says quietly. Then she turns and walks slowly back to her room, shutting the door behind her with a firm click.
When we wake up the next day, there is fried chicken on the table, its skin crispy and golden brown, its flesh juicy and tantalizing. I can’t eat it, can’t look at it without thinking of Frankie’s hands wrapped around its neck. But Uncle Chong and Vince and the neighbors we call to come over, they eat and eat and eat until there is nothing left but a pile of bones, savoring every mouthful.
Auntie Bee doesn’t take a single bite.
CHAPTER SIX
THE DAY WANES ON, AND we all do our best to take our minds off the fighting all around us. Uncle Chong, Frankie, and Vince work on digging the tunnel below the wall in the back garden, behind the flowering shrubs of jasmine. The steady clink, clink, clink of their shovels against the dirt is soothing, and in my head I count along: one, two, three, one two three, one, two, three, just like music. Unbidden, the words of a Beatles song float through my head as they so often do, this time a strange little song about a girl with kaleidoscope eyes. It’s not my favorite; John sings lead on this and not Paul, so to me it’s automatically not as great as it could be. But there’s something about the lyrics, so lavish and so odd—tangerine trees, marmalade skies, rocking horse people, marshmallow pies—that send colors shooting through my head, like fireworks.
As they immerse themselves in their task, often pausing to consider their progress and discuss their options—“You think we need it bigger?” “No lah Ba, we should keep it this size, so it isn’t easy to find.” “But what if some of the fatter villagers cannot fit? You know how big Uncle Maniam has gotten since he got married!”—I sing softly under my breath and prod through the upturned earth, looking for five fairly smooth stones of roughly the same size. The music, the beat, the act of methodically rooting through the dirt—all of this helps to keep the Djinn mercifully silent, or at least to drown out the worst of his whispers.
In the afternoon, when the heat forces the men back indoors, we sit on the back porch and I do my best to use the stones to teach Vince the intricate throwing and catching motions that make up the game of Batu Seremban, which my girlfriends and I played incessantly as children; in return, he shuffles through a worn deck of playing cards and tries to teach me the rules of gin rummy. We are both terrible.
“This would be so much better if we could bet on it,” he mutters, clenching his jaw and narrowing his eyes in concentration as he flings one stone straight up in the air and quickly attempts to sweep up the four on the ground in time to catch it. Only he messes up and ends up scattering the stones every which way, sending them clattering loudly against the wooden floorboards. He clicks his tongue in frustration. “You see? I have no incentive to get it right.”
“Why must you Chinamen gamble on everything?” I tease him.
“Why are you Malays so backward that you have to play with rocks?” he retorts back.
We spend the evening in his room. He leaves the door open for propriety’s sake, yet my body still buzzes with a nervous energy that won’t let me stay still. Is it the Djinn? Is it something else? I don’t know. Instead, I drift from here to there, touching this, picking up that, running my fingers along the belongings I’m starting to know as well as my own. The tin of musky pomade and the orange plastic comb that lie on the shelf beneath the speckled mirror on the wall. The family picture in a simple gold frame by his bed: Auntie Bee staring straight at the camera, hair perfectly coiffed for the occasion, Uncle Chong with glasses far too big for his face, smiling his warm smile, a small Frankie looking sullenly at the photographer in a starched sailor suit, and a tiny Vince, a smile splitting his face in two, a tendril of drool shining on his chin, snug on Auntie Bee’s lap. The notebooks lining the worn wooden desk like sentinels, each filled from cover to cover with surprisingly neat handwriting, small and straight, each stroke thick and assured. And all along one wall, bookshelves filled with the books I’ve come to know so well. There are 115 altogether, or there were—it wasn’t divisible by three, a fact that caused me so much anxiety and grief that eventually the Djinn demanded I slip one book out of the case and put it on the shelf in the living room instead. I glance at him as he runs his hands over the remaining 114 and wonder if he notices their missing comrade, but he’s more preoccupied with the fact that I’ve rearranged them.
“Did you alphabetize them?” His voice has a note of amused disbelief that makes me flush bright red.