Sketcher (13 page)

Moms spoke that legend like it was all true, stoppin' a few times to get the glisten out of her eyes. Well, even though I was all of twelve goin' on thirteen at the time, I felt brandnew again, like I was just born, like back in the day when ol' Pa Campbell used to hang out with me and tell me cool stories.

I don't know 'bout my brothers, but before all these revelations there were questions deep behind the ol' Skid skull. To me it was like you're at the bottom of a pool, so all you can hear is muffles from above and everybody below is speakin' in bubbles. Or you're watchin' a movie and some dude decides to drag a chair through the most important part of the dialogue.

So I guess that San Tainos place was hauntin' my head long before I heard about it. I tasted it in Valerie Beaumont's cooking, when the meal came out not quite Creole or Cajun but stopped somewhere in between, or was just completely different. I could hear it when she was navigatin' the corners of her American accent and she hit a syllable really hard, and somethin' else tumbled out from under her tongue. Her grammar always stood steady, but the sound changed, like that time in Principal Phillips' office. I heard it in my own voice, but only when I talked proper English and the kids at school looked at me weird. They said my accent kept changin' gears. Talk about goddamn sour grapes. I told them they needed to listen in English and go learn to spell words like ‘colour' and ‘honour' correctly. Of course, it was
me
who always got those words wrong in class. Life is not fair. Anyway, slowly I was realizin' that I was more San Tainos than New O'lins. Or maybe I was caught in between them, like Moms' cookin'.

“So when are we goin' there?”

Frico was askin' if we could ever visit the island, and she just smiled and looked off at nothin', starin' dead ahead with her palm under her chin, like she was watchin' reruns in her head.

“You can go there right now. If you can fly real fast like a hummingbird, go west-south-west. Keep your eyes open or you'll miss it. It's always under a cloud.”

After that, when the fire was dyin' down, she didn't make it blaze again, and we knew she needed the shadows for a few seconds. There was a question-and-answer session after that, and I had a coupla things to ask – but I couldn't just jump into the hocus-pocus part of San Tainos and her naturalmagic workin' and she and Captain Benet and all that, so I played smart.

“Did Pops like San Tainos?”

“Oh boy, that man
loved
the place.”

“He used to come all the way there to see you?”

“Quite a bit... yes.”

“By himself?”

At that point Moms, she just looked at me like she knew that I'd heard all about the conjurations and the grimoire seals and, worst of all, about her and Benet. The thought flashed in my head that I could twist her arm a bit and get her to influence Frico, but for three days after that she kept me so busy with chores every day after school I knew she was sendin' me a message.

By the way, I found out the reason that tamarind-tree conference room was so cool. It grew from tamarinds that my pops carried from San Tainos back in the day. He was eatin' some of that stuff and spat those seeds in the swamp years before we were born. He was still a coward, though.

Now, maybe it was cos Pa Campbell told me all these other stories, but I was diggin' this whole San Tainos thing. Like somebody found an old picture of me and blew the dust off it and handed it back to me. Moms bought shoots and
seeds, and we started a garden. She was better at real food, like tomatoes, callaloo, peppers and corn than those flowers she wanted to plant. In the summer we boys tried our hand at dasheen and cassava. Those are like root foods and stuff. They taste much better than they sound, by the way.

We learnt about Taino words – that, like us, were only slightly changed or misinterpreted and hidden in plain sight. When we cooked outside on the “barbecue”, when we rowed out to fish in a “canoe” and when Doug got in trouble for tryin' some chewin' “tobacco” that made him drowsy for hours, those were all Taino vocabulary.

Shortly after, I wanted my hair back in a topknot, like when we were little. I could have it like that at home at least. Moms didn't mind teasin' it into a knot and all, even though it was coarser now. She said we were on earth to gather up the pieces of our lives and make somethin' of ourselves. The African and the Cajun parts of us were easier to find, but the Taino took a little more diggin', cos the culture was almost buried along with many of the people. She said I should go dig at the library over in Algiers. Well, I did, and it turns out that in San Tainos' case, the Spaniards did those Tainos in with hard work and diseases – all the ones who didn't head for the hills, I mean. Meanwhile those who ran away to live with the Cimarrónes were sittin' pretty. The volcano had two massive cones up in the sky and inside one of them was a world by itself. There were lakes and rich soil and little crop farms and lots of birds comin' and goin'. Spanish soldiers tried three times to come up into those sky burners, but Bik'ua hid herself under a cloud, so they got confused and fell down ditches and stabbed each other and all that. The English came after a while and threw out the Spaniards, to put it nicely. Then they tried to make it up the mountain and got caught up in bloody clashes. But then the mountain started rumblin' and heatin' up, so the Cimarrónes slash Tainos called a truce and came down the volcano to meet them. This part was eerie, written
by an English guy who travelled all that way just to write stuff down:

The Tainos and Cimarrónes came down from the mist of those cones after generations, blinking eyes and straining ears. There was hardly any echo of Spanish and no trace of any Arawakan tongue, save that which stammered from their own lips. The streets were empty of their people and filled with brand-new, loud and fearsome contraptions.

Contraptions
.
Now, there's a word that sounds like the thing itself. I like those long-ago guys, though. They got words to shake ya. Anyway, after readin' that at the library, I told Moms about the volcano drawin' I did for that lady doctor back in the day. She said she saw it and she wasn't surprised. My Pops warned her never to tell us about San Tainos, but she would whisper Bik'ua's name in both ears when we were born.

“Stranger things have happened in our house. You didn't just draw that out of the blue.”

So we settled in – and, honestly, it was like an adventure all over again. That is until some of the gloom and doom that Pa Campbell predicted walked up to our doorstep, literally. One mornin' Pa Campbell rapped on the window with his rifle, and when we went out, he shook as he pointed out some huge, grey footprints from one end of our front porch to the next. Whoever or whatever paid us a visit had walked barefoot and then tracked mud across the anatto-red floorboard to the front window. He pointed out that they were crouchin' as they walked, sometimes goin' down on all fours, and you could see that they had tipped up on their toes to look inside on us while we slept. Calvin's kids hadn't made a sound, so Doug was sayin' it's Pops, but Moms said her husband's foot is half that size: he'd never go barefoot, and the man she married didn't walk up the aisle on all fours.

After that she bought her own rifle. Bolt action. She blamed those parasites, the swamp rats, but I knew what she meant. Tony took sticks and old clothes and started trainin' Calvin's six kids. And that's when Moms gave Frico a job to paint some diagrams on the lower part of the house usin' that redpowder thing. He had to do it before nightfall each day and within seven days. Turns out that the red-anatto thing also wards off spirits.

Thirteen

Mai was mad at me cos I'd finally told her that we were the ones who sent Calvin over to the Benets' house that night a while back, and that's how the whole thing started. Doug and Tony made me swear not to say anythin' to anybody, but Mai wasn't just anybody. Well, as soon as I told her, that girl gave me a solid scoldin' about bein' more responsible and how I could have been killed. You shoulda seen her rockin' her head and hollerin' at me in Vietnamese and very good English. You believe that? You teach your girl English and she beats you over the head with it. After that, whenever I went to the Lam Lee Hahn, she talked to me like I was just a customer: “May I help you, sir?” or “Sorry sir, we don't have any brown rice.” Worse than that, she stopped givin' me my lagniappe – that's like somethin' extra that you get in your groceries, just for shoppin'.

“
Lan-yap
is for people who deserve it. Have a good day.”

And she would close the cash register and look away, like I wasn't there. Well, that kind of abuse just made her cuter.

So one evenin' after school I washed my face and spruced up my topknot and put on clean jeans and went over to Lam Lee Hahn. That day she wasn't mindin' the shop, so she was in the backyard. I didn't have to knock, cos by the time I walked up, their little butt-biting dog started hollerin'. Mai, she came around the side and saw me. She opened a small gate in the wooden fence and put one hand on her hip.

“May I help you sir?” Cute as hell.

“I didn't come to see you, I came to meet Kuan – that person you told me about that day at Al Dubois.”

“Hmm. I see. Let me check if she's available.”

She closed the gate again and walked away down a neat footpath that they had made from broken pieces of Vietnamese pottery. Seemed like every time someone dropped an expensive pot or a bottle, they just took the accident and made somethin' pretty. I trailed my eyes along that mosaic of deep-blue and red glass and yellow clay pieces and listened to her footsteps fadin', while a tall weepin' willow howled in the breeze. Meanwhile, the dog, he recognized me even though it'd been five long years since we danced cheek to cheek. So he decided to keep an eye on me until Mai got back. He put his paws under the fence and stuck his face between them and kept sniffin' the air and sneezin' when the dirt got sucked back up into his nose. Stupid dog. I tried to ignore him, so for the first time I really took a look at the Lam Lee Hahn property. You really couldn't tell it was a shop by just passing by in a train. It looked like one of those pagodas you'd see in a World Atlas. Well, not as fancy, but the colours were the same. And it looked like somethin' that grew out from the ground, rather than something constructed. There was a high red wooden fence at the front. Grapefruit trees were planted all along the length of it, and the bright-yellow fruit stood out against the flat red. Four tall wood columns divided the fence into sections. Rough dragon carvings curled around each column, with the dragons clawin' their way towards a blazin' gold ball at the top. A white sign with Vietnamese writin' hung right above the front doors. I couldn't tell if it said “Lam Lee Hahn”, but it looked cool. The dog jumped up and wagged his tail. Mai came back to the small gate, opened it and stepped back to let me in.

“Come this way, sir.”

She clapped her hands at the dog. He ran ahead of us growlin' over his dog shoulder. My hands went into my back pockets and covered both cheeks until he parked himself under a bush. We walked on the path, and suddenly I was in a completely different place in the world. The Lam Lee Hahn
front yard and shop was nothin'. The backyard was an experience. Everywhere people walked around busy. Some were pickin' bitter melons and veggies from vines wrapped around wooden frames erected in the yard. Others were cookin' in aluminum pots, and behind them there were rice fields that stretched almost out to the mangroves in the pass.

Lam Lee Hahn was on L-Island, but a long fence separated them from us. I reckon their rice fields was in line with Pa Campbell's sugar cane on the other side of the red wooden fence, though. That fence went all the way around the property 'cept for the back, which faced the lake and the Gulf. I couldn't tell if the people in the rice field were men or women, cos they all had these huge cone-shaped straw hats on their heads. They all sang a Vietnamese song as they bent down and stuck little plants into the water. I didn't want to know the English lyrics, cos that would just spoil the sweetness of it. One guy was flooding the rice field with a desalination pump. Mai looked at my eyes and asked if I was excited. Well hell yes, I
was
excited... about all the money they must have been makin' in the swamps! But I wasn't going to say that last part. My moms taught me better than that. When I thought I'd seen everything, Mai, she walked away and motioned with her head for me to follow.

“Want to see where we grow the shrimp?”

Now look, these people had ponds – not small pools – ponds full of juicy shrimp and prawns and mud crabs. And beyond the ponds you could see the fishermen. Some takin' off in boats across the lake headed for the Gulf and others landin' and haulin' out big baskets of sea fish. Still others hauled produce into boats to take around the swamp and sell from what they called a Vietnamese “Floatin' Market”.

Mai put her hands together and spoke to one of the men in Vietnamese, and he brought us some big ol' prawns that he roasted on an open fire. Mine was hot and burned my mouth. Mai laughed at me, and that's when I knew she wasn't mad
any more. She grabbed my arm and, runnin', she pulled me into the buildin'. I couldn't see, on account of just jumpin' out of the light, so Mai led me through a long corridor, stop-pin' as soon as we were safely in the dark to pull me towards her with both hands. My first kiss tasted like seafood with some shell in it.

We stood there winded, not from runnin', but from borrowin' each other's breath. I saw the white of her eyes close up. She had the softest stare – the kindest eyes – and she didn't know it. Then she told me to close mine. I waited for the second kiss, but she slapped me lightly on the cheek and said we were in a temple, for godssake. I chased her through the corridor. Up ahead there was light reflecting off a big brass gong, and the whole way down the hall there was this smell – extra sweet and warm, but sooty – like perfume on fire.

We walked into a dimly lit room with more dragons. But this time the dragons were carved into wooden walls of deep red, like dried roses. Those dragons had the same beautiful broken pieces of pottery for scales and eyes. Vietnamese words were everywhere, but I'm sure all of them said “silence”.

“Quiet, now,” Mai was whisperin'.

She took off her shoes and tiptoed across the floor. I did the same and followed her, happy that I was bandwagonin' Frico's clean, new sweat socks that didn't have holes in 'em. The perfume smell was stronger now. Incense. I really wanted to know what kind. I sniffed the air.

“What's that?”

Out of the dimness, a man's voice boomed: “Your nose!” “Who's that?”

“Your ears!”

Mai sounded apologetic. “
Thay Samadh, tôi
...”

“Englis'!”

“Master Samadh. I didn't know you were in here.”

“I know you not know I here.”

It was the old Vietnamese man. That's the exact same voice I saw in his eyebrows. Funny how it made me think of a big block of cracked ice.

A lamp in the corner slowly became brighter.

He was seated on the floor in a pumpkin-coloured robe. It had a sparklin' embroidered collar that had all the colours of the mosaic walkway. The collar looped around his neck, curved down across his chest and disappeared under one arm. His eyes were closed, but he moved a string of big brown beads between his fingers, like he was learnin' to count.

“Skid, this is Master Samadh – Master Samadh...”

“Yes, I know, Skeed. What that name is... Englis'?”

I swallowed, wonderin' if the guy could see us with his eyes closed. “Yes, sir.”

“Sounds funny... Skeed.”

I think it was a good opportunity to use his phrase back on him. But when I said “Your ears”, I realized it didn't make sense in the same way he said it. Mai looked at me and rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders and opened her palms and mouthed at me silently as if to say, “What the hell was that?”

Samadh opened his eyes and caught her mid-what-the-hell.

“Why ahh you here?” he asked me.

“I came to see Mai.”

Mai rolled her eyes again. “He came to see Kuan Am, Master Sam.”

“Ah! Then we do not keep Kuan Am waiting... Skeed.”

“Skid.”
Pause.

“Yes.” His eyes shut down again.

I wondered about his kung fu. All guys like him in the movies can fight kung fu. I asked Mai, and she said stupid questions are worse than kissin' in the temple.

We walked between two columns, and there in front of us, sittin' cross-legged under a slice of sunlight through the roof, was a big bronze statue, about seven feet tall. Fruits were laid
out in bowls in front of it. The feet were covered in chrysanthemums – those fluffy yellow flowers with petals folding over each other. Orange tongues came up from candles and licked at the shadows in the room, revealin' family faces in gold frames. The photos were sittin' on two low tables to the right. Mai said one was of her father, who died when she was three. Around the pictures, burnin' incense sticks scribbled a strange language on thin air. A wooden screen with floral designs was folded out behind the statue, and you could see the red wall of the room and two paper lanterns through the cuts. Funny how a heavy wooden thing could look like lace – or as if it was crocheted instead of carved. Mai sat on a fancy carpet on the floor and rested back on her heels. I did the same, uncomfortably, and looked around.

“So where's Kuan?”

“Keep your voice down.” She pointed at the bronze statue with her entire hand. “
This
is Kuan Am.”

“
This
is Kuan?” I repeated out of disbelief.

“Yes. Kuan Am the Compassionate is very important goddess in Vietnam. We're Catholic now. But this was my family shrine-room statue when I was baby. She's beautiful, isn't she?”

I couldn't believe I washed my face and got dressed and braved her dragon dog to meet a
statue
. Mai was on a roll.

“In Asian custom, she's a person who – how you say in English? – oh, delays her own happiness to help other people. She tries to help everybody in the world, even if that's impossible. That's why she has so many hands.” That's when I saw that Kuan Am had about twenty-eight arms, and I was happy she wasn't a flesh-and-blood person, cos the handshakin' alone would have taken us a little while.

“Kuan Am has a thousand arms.”

I tried, but I couldn't make out the rest of them. All I saw was what looked like a vertical halo behind her. Then Mai really started whisperin'.

“Master Samadh was a monk in Vietnam. Now he's just homesick. So I'm happy the statue is here to remind him of it.”

I asked her about her family, just to be polite.

“I was baby, but I hear Master Samadh helped my family leave Vietnam – and then, at the last minute, he decided to come here with us. I call him my grandpa sometimes, but he's not. And still, even though he isn't family, he did everything he could do for us.”

I just shook my head. I knew a guy that could help many people with one left hand and he wasn't doin' nothin'.

“Kuan is very nice,” I told her. And I meant it.

Then I felt somethin' in my pocket and remembered that I had picked the last tamarinds from the tree and taken them as a peace offerin' for Mai. She liked that kind of tangy thing more than I did. I told her I didn't have any more, cos Moms said we climbed that tamarind tree too often and shook off the little blossoms, so the tree can't catch a break. Right about when I was imitatin' Moms' voice sayin' “And it's a shame when something doesn't come to full fruit”, Samadh told me to shut up.

“Shhh!
n có nhai, nói có ngh
!
” – or something like that.