The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (9 page)

“Did you think I was going to hurt you?”

Thuy began to back away slowly.

“Don’t you know who I am? Haven’t you ever wondered why I can speak to you? Haven’t you wondered why there are
never any other customers here? Haven’t you wondered what you’ve been smelling this entire time?” Then she laughed and laughed and kept laughing as Thuy sprinted away without looking back once.

After a couple of minutes Thuy slowed to a jog because she was out of breath. Then she stopped completely and looked at her surroundings. With a terrible, sinking feeling, she realized that for the first time in her life she had no idea where she was. She was as lost in this city as she would have been if she had been dropped blindfolded into the middle of a jungle. The sun had passed its zenith, and people were beginning to filter back into the streets, back to their markets and gambling corners and motorbikes. Without her grandmother there, Thuy could feel their eyes on her, mocking her, the lost girl, the fat girl, the girl who didn’t belong.

She walked down alleys that seemed to coil and rearrange themselves like a knot of serpents. Her feet did not lead her home as they had done before; her nose had nothing to follow now. The streets became wider and Thuy laughed bitterly when she saw that she had ended up in front of the church from her mother’s photograph. A skinny young couple in a Western wedding dress and tuxedo were posing on the steps for their own pictures. Thuy caught the bride staring at her as she passed. The streets turned narrow again and Thuy accidentally wandered into a strange house, mistaking its long, winding entryway for another alley and startling the family that lived there. Their small child started crying when he saw Thuy, and she made a hasty exit. After what felt like hours,
Thuy looked up to find that she was in front of a familiar doorstep; the city, having tired of toying with her, had deposited her at her grandmother’s house once more.

As Thuy dragged herself over the threshold, she met Kieu coming down the stairs. “Oh, there you are! I woke up and you were gone. But I thought you might be with Grandma,” Kieu said, wiping the sleep from her eyes.

Thuy sidestepped her and started down the hallway toward the kitchen.

“Hey! Thuy! Where are you going? What are you doing out there?”

In the garden, past the water pump, behind the lime trees and golden hibiscus and creeping tendrils of a particular flower-specked vine that had no name in English, was the body that had once been her grandmother’s. Greedy black flies and a mass of wriggling white worms were fighting one another for the last of the decomposing flesh. But Thuy knew that she had been dead for about three weeks from the smell alone.

H
OW MANY TIMES HAVE
I made the trip? More than the number of hairs on my head, and you see how thick it still is, even if it’s white now. Back when I started the job, over forty years ago, I would leave Ca Mau at noon, when the roads were hot and empty, and wouldn’t reach Saigon until dawn the next day. The roads are better now, so I could make it in seven hours if I drove without stopping. Can’t, though—too old. Every two hours I need to break and take a dribbly piss in a rice paddy. Children bicycling past me while I’m stopped like to peek at the harmless, wrinkled remains of my
cặc
and giggle. “Too many women,” I’ll call to them. “It’s all worn-out now.” I usually grow sleepy somewhere between Soc Trang and Tra Vinh, so I’ll sling my hammock between the truck’s back tires and nap for a while.

These days I only ever get hired for boring jobs. I mostly move motorbikes and the kind of traditional carved furniture
that no one actually likes to sit on. Occasionally I make the odd coconut delivery and that’s about as exciting as it gets. But when the truck and I were both younger we carried anything and everything you could think of. Guns? Of course! Sometimes they heaped the open back of the pickup with AK-47
S
—just tossed them in like sacks of rice and didn’t bother covering them up—and I would spend the entire ride listening as the guns rattled around, praying one wouldn’t accidentally go off. Other times it was soldiers crammed in the cargo hold; when the sun got too hot they all took their shirts off but kept their helmets on, and when I hit potholes they would reach up to keep them on their heads in unison. In the nineties it was a lot of livestock: wooden crates of pigs and goats, and every week a huge shipment of ducks, their feet tied together, twelve stuffed in each sack, twenty-five sacks in each load. If it rained during the drive, the quacking was deafening.

Let me tell you my favorite story. Once, the son of a certain general—you’d know the name if I said it—paid me to transport a baby shark from Saigon to his house in Vinh Long. Well, they called it a baby when I took the job. I thought it might be catfish-sized, cute even. But when I came to pick it up at the docks I discovered that the beast was the size of a boat, with more teeth in its mouth than you’d want to see in a lifetime. It took me and seven other men to load the tank into the pickup. That was one of my fastest trips. I drove without sleeping and kept a bucket of fish heads in the passenger seat to feed to the thing whenever it started thrashing, for when it got restless the entire truck would shake. It was a spectacle.
Curious motorbikes followed the truck for leagues, so distracted by the creature in the tank that they almost hit each other. When I made it to Vinh Long, the general’s son himself oversaw the transfer of the shark to a pool out behind the compound that could have fit most of Ca Mau inside it. While he was counting out my payment I couldn’t resist asking him why he wanted such a wicked-looking fish in the first place. The general’s son looked surprised that I had spoken.

After a moment he said, “I choose to keep company with monsters simply because I can.” He then smiled politely, but in a way that told me it was time to go.

The hours on the road were long, but they were never really lonely. Most of the time I had somebody tagging along for a ride to the city or back from it. The ones I brought up to Saigon were always kids fresh off the farm: tired of living with their parents and looking for excitement. They seemed all the more innocent because they thought they were so worldly. The ones I returned south with were older, sadder. They had discovered that excitement is really just smog and noise and never seeing the stars, and trash piled up in the streets. They would ride with their heads out the window, their faces softening as the city fell away and the world turned flat and emerald-colored again; they were waiting for the moment when we crossed into their province, when they would smack the dashboard and cry out, “Here! Here!”

I dropped them off on the side of the highway and drove away, but I always watched in the rearview mirror as they started walking through the fields in the direction of their village. Someone else would give them a lift sooner or later.

Driving at night you have your jumpy moments, sure. From Saigon to Can Tho City there’s not much except your skinny strip of asphalt cutting through rice paddy for 125 miles, and those 125 miles are very, very dark. And when things slither across the road, or weird lights bob out in the fields … Our grandmothers told us the stories. Our muddy patch of the world was already shadowy and blood-soaked and spirit-friendly long before the Americans got here. There’s ancient and ugly things waiting to harm you in that darkness. Yes, of course they’re there in daylight, too—they’re just harder to spot. I’m not by any means a small man. I’m not the man you’d pick a fight with if you could help it. But I do get jittery sometimes.

Still, I’ve only been
really
scared once. That story’s not as good as the one about the shark, but I’ll tell it to you anyway, just because you’re still listening.

I
T WAS AFTER THE WAR
, so I wasn’t young anymore, but I was still good-looking enough that girls I didn’t know would address me as “Older Brother,” and not “Uncle.” That afternoon I was up in Saigon, out by the hospital in District 5 to pick up crates of bandages, syringes, burn ointment, and cough medicine. Every month or so I would run a standard medical shipment like this.

I’d finished loading the truck and securing the crates and had turned my attention to scraping the last bits of supper from my tin—steamed pork intestines and cabbage that my
wife, saintly woman, had packed for me the day before. Then from behind me, someone cleared her throat. I turned: There, standing in the doorway to the hospital, was the prettiest little thing in a starched white uniform. The nurse was peach-colored and plump in all the right places, one stockinged leg crossed behind the other, with bits of dark hair escaping from their pins and eyelashes so long they cast curving shadows on her cheeks.

“Pardon me, but are you driving south?” the girl asked, in a voice as sweet as she looked.

I put down my dinner and swallowed hard. “All the way down to Ca Mau, Little Sister. You can’t go much farther south than that.”

“Will you be going through Dong Thap province?”

“Dong Thap? The place is a real swamp, but I could swing through no problem, no problem at all.”

“And,” she left the doorway and sauntered right up to me, heels clip-clopping, “do you have room for a passenger?”

I brushed a lock of loose hair back behind her ear and her face grew hot but she didn’t flinch. “I’ve got plenty of that,” I said. This ride was going to be fun.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything to pay you with …”

“Oh, I don’t want your money, Little Sister.”

Her pink lips suddenly sharpened into a smile. “Wonderful!” she said. “I’ll go get him then.”

“Him?”

“Wait here.” She darted back inside the hospital. Cunning little bitch. I packed up dinner and went to piss behind a bus
stop, cursing quietly. When I came back she had returned with a boy who could have been anywhere from eleven to eighteen years old, possibly even older. He was dressed in a pair of faded blue pajamas; the top had no buttons so it hung open to reveal his wasted torso—the kind of skinny that I hadn’t seen since the early seventies. His rib cage looked like it might break through the skin at any moment. His face was ashen, with bruise-colored rings around the eyes, and his hands shook where they dangled at his sides. But it was the way he smelled that troubled me the most. The boy was sick bad, anyone could see that, and sick people smell like sweat and shit and piss and puke. But his smell was different. Sort of cold, cold and metallic. Like a very clean knife.

“This your brother or boyfriend or something?” I asked, trying to conceal my unease.

“No, this is Minh,” the nurse said cheerfully. “Minh is about to die.” As if in response, Minh let his mouth fall slack and released a cough that rattled his entire body. I didn’t doubt her words. “But,” the nurse continued, “he wants to die back in his village. Not here, not alone in Saigon.” There were tiny lines at the corners of the nurse’s eyes. She wasn’t nearly as young or as pretty as I’d thought. “You’ll take him there.” It did not appear to be a question.

I looked the kid over some more. He didn’t look like he would even last the five hours to Dong Thap. I should have said no. I was going to. But when I looked down at his feet, I saw that the boy was wearing a pair of slippers fashioned out of carefully folded newspapers. It was those newspaper shoes
that did me in. I couldn’t refuse a poor little bastard who was inches from the grave but was still too dignified to walk around barefoot. “I’m not going to get in any trouble, right? The doctors won’t mind me driving off with him like this?”

The nurse cocked an eyebrow at me. “Do you have any idea how many patients are in this hospital? We’ve got two to each bed, and two on mats on the floor beneath them. Honestly, the doctor’ll be glad to have him gone.”

“Okay. I’ll do it.” I climbed into the driver’s seat. “But I’m doing you a big favor. This is a delivery truck, not a taxi.”

The nurse led the boy around to the passenger side and helped him in. He immediately pulled his legs up to his chest in the seat and buried his face between his knees. The vertebrae of his neck jutted up like the ridges of a giant lizard. Nurse gave him a farewell pat on the head and then turned on her little white heels to leave without thanking me. After a moment she stopped mid-stride.

“Ah, Older Brother, I forgot to tell you something very important,” she said, looking at me over her shoulder, one hand positioned on one round hip. I stuck my head out the window expectantly. “You shouldn’t tell Minh your name. In fact, it would be better if you don’t say anything to him at all. But especially not your name. If it should come up, do try to hold your tongue.”

Now this was too much. “First you trick me into taking a corpse off your hands, and now you won’t even let me talk to it! Giving me orders! You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Little Sister.” I put the truck into reverse and began to pull
away, and then slammed on the brake again, feeling indignant. Minh pitched forward a bit in the passenger seat but didn’t fall over. “You,” I called out the window, “are a bad girl. A wicked girl. And there’s nothing in the world worse than that. If my wife behaved like you I would thrash her with a jackfruit skin! If I ever have a daughter I plan on beating the disobedience out of her daily! I really should teach you a lesson right here, but I’m too soft to do it.”