The Time in Between (6 page)

“I guess.”

“By yourself?”

“I guess.”

“That ’s a lot of guessing. You a friend of Mr. Manik?” He pronounced the name wrong, with a long
eee
on the last syllable, as if the man were not to be taken seriously.

“Yes.”

“How good a friend?”

“Pretty good.”

Charles didn’t speak. They walked together in silence until they reached the house and then Charles said good night. Del looked at him and she went to her room.

He lay in bed that night and waited for sleep, but when it didn’t come he got up and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table. In the morning Ada found him sleeping at the table. He woke and picked up his coffee cup and said, “Look at me, sleeping everywhere but where I’m supposed to.”

Ada made fresh coffee, and while she did this he watched her. He said, “What do you think of Tomas Manik?”

Ada looked up and then away. She shrugged. “He’s all right.”

“You know about your sister?”

Ada said she did.

“And Jon, he knows?”

Ada nodded.

“So, I’m the only one in the dark here. Is that it?”

“Del was worried. She figured you might strangle Tomas.”

“That’s the goddamn truth.”

Ada said that there wasn’t anything they could do. Del had made up her mind. She faced Charles and said that he shouldn’t do anything stupid. “Tomas pays you for your work. You need him.”

Charles was astounded by his daughter’s matter-of-factness. He said, “It’s like I’m selling her then.”

“That’s ridiculous. This has nothing to do with you, Dad.”

“Sure as hell does.” He stood and pulled on his boots. Went outside and got into the pickup and looked out the windshield at the gray sky. Ada was watching from the kitchen window. He could see her profile and the fall of her hair. He started the engine, backed out of the drive onto the gravel road, and climbed toward Tomas Manik’s house.

There was no one at the house, so Charles slid down the muddy path toward the workshop. He didn’t knock, just walked in. Tomas was working and listening to jazz. The sound system he had was big, and a high whining clarinet filled the space. Charles stood in the entrance and watched Tomas work. He was welding, his back to Charles, and there was the flare of the welder and a brightness against the far wall. Tomas pushed his goggles up and turned and saw Charles. He put his tools down and walked over to the stereo and switched it off. He said, “Charles.”

Charles stepped forward. He was breathless and he rummaged about for the words that would penetrate Tomas’s smooth ease. He wondered where in this shop Del and the man would have had sex. Perhaps they went into the house.

“I’m here about Del. She’s been coming here, to see you.”

Tomas sat on a stool. He lit a cigarette and motioned at a free chair but Charles shook his head. Tomas said that it was true, Del did come to visit. However, he said, every time Del walked the mile and a half to his shop, she was choosing to do so and there was nothing he could say or do to stop her.

“You’re fucking a minor,” Charles said.

Tomas raised his eyebrows. “She said that? Or you?”

Charles stepped back. “I could kill you,” he said.

Tomas shook his head. “You won’t do that. Not because you’re incapable. I can see what kind of man you are. I have known men like you, and normally they frighten me, but you, Charles Boatman, won’t do such a thing. You love your daughter too much.”

Charles looked around at the sculptures and the drawings and paintings. He said, “I bet you figure you’re a pretty good artist. That this is real art. Big art.” He swung his arm out at the space and said, “I figure you love this work.” Then he said that it was dangerous to love something too much. Especially something inanimate. He walked over to a sculpture of stainless steel. It was a man, ten feet tall. Testicles of ball bearings and a penis of solid steel, turned slightly, with a circumcised tip of hammered copper. Charles had milled the metal for the piece and delivered it three weeks earlier. He touched the ball bearings and said, “I could castrate this fellow for you.”

He looked over at Tomas, who was no longer smiling.

Charles patted the hollow thigh of the sculpture. “If you hurt her, I’ll kill you,” he said. Then he turned and walked to the door and stepped outside and walked back up to his truck. Sat in it and thought about Tomas and thought about Del. His hands were shaking. He started the truck and drove home and found Ada at the kitchen table. She’d done the dishes and made herself toast and eggs. She asked if he wanted some, and then, not waiting for an answer, she got up and turned on the element. Fried him eggs and laid them out on a plate with buttered toast.

Charles ate and watched Ada watching him. Finally, he said, “You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you? Run off with a man twice your age?”

“She hasn’t run off, Dad.”

“She will. I can see it.” He drank his coffee, put the mug down, and said, “I want to burn the man’s shop down. But like you said, that would be like torching my own income, seeing as I supply him with all his metal. And so, here I sit, believing that money is more important than my younger daughter.”

“It’s not.”

“No?” Charles loved Ada’s confidence, the fact that she didn’t trust the obvious. Whereas Del was enthusiastic and gullible, Ada was skeptical. She would suffer for it. He didn’t tell her that, but he could see that hers would not be a naïve existence. He said, “The man’s too damn smug.” Then he sighed and asked Ada about Claire Toupin. What did she think of her?

Ada made a face. Said that it was unfair to ask, because obviously
he
liked her and it didn’t matter what Ada thought.

“Oh, it matters. It might not change anything, but it matters.”

“She’s plastic,” Ada said.

Charles lifted an eyebrow and said, “Well.”

“At least she looks that way. And even when she talks, everything’s so exciting. She’s too happy. She doesn’t seem very”—Ada moved a hand, looking for the word—“very aware.”

“She’s good for me.”

“I know.”

“I could use some happiness.”

“I’m glad for you, Dad. Really.” She stood and kissed his forehead. She had just showered and he smelled the shampoo and her hair was still damp. Its length fell forward and brushed his cheek and he recalled Claire’s hair falling against his chest. He wanted to hang on to this brief moment.

CHARLES DID NOTHING ABOUT TOMAS AND DEL. HE THOUGHT about it. One night, he left the house around 3 A.M. and he walked up the hill, carrying a jerry can of gas. He went directly toward Tomas’s workshop and he stood and imagined what havoc would transpire as the building went up in bright flames. There would be the fire trucks arriving too late from the valley, and the police would come and questions would be asked and of course everything would point back to Charles Boatman and, in the end, Charles couldn’t imagine leaving his children alone. He would be put in prison and Ada would have to take over the house and the responsibilities, and so, he couldn’t act. It wasn’t cowardice. He was a practical man.

He was aware of Del’s movements back and forth between the two places, but he did nothing, and it grieved him that Tomas had been right. And then, one day, Del moved in with the artist. She pulled up in Tomas’s pickup, loaded her things, and drove back up the mountain. Charles watched her, and just before she left, he said, “At least he could come down here and talk.”

“He’s scared of you, Dad,” Del said.

Charles thought about this and it didn’t surprise him. What surprised him was Del’s acceptance of this fact, as if she knew that her father was capable of some sort of madness. It was as if she had thrown up a mirror before him and he hadn’t recognized himself.

Still, after a month or so, Del brought Tomas down to the caboose for a visit. She’d made a cake and sat beside Tomas and urged him to eat. She clung to his arm and kissed his big head and put her hands against his neck and the side of his face. He was brash and full of bluster and talked about his projects and the money he was making, but he never looked Charles in the eye.

Later, Charles asked Ada, “What did he think I was going to do?”

“You’re unpredictable, Dad.”

“Ach, that’s bullshit. Anyways, Del sure seems fired up for him.”

And then, within the month, Ada moved to Vancouver. She was studying culinary arts at a local college. And then Jon moved out as well. He found a place in Abbotsford where he planned to finish high school. Only later did Charles learn that Jon had moved in with an older man, a high school history teacher, but by the time Charles heard about this, his own demons had come back and he didn’t have the wherewithal to confront Jon.

The silence defeated him. At first he had been pleased to think of living on his own again. Claire could visit without interruptions, there would be less food to buy, less cleaning, fewer troubles, not as much money needed, though it became quite clear that Ada needed her tuition fees and rent money; she had a part-time job but she was hard-pressed to pay for the apartment. So, Charles helped her out. Del and Jon seemed to need nothing, which was disconcerting.

In the mornings, as the rain drove against the windows, he considered his day and discovered that hope had previously been based on busyness. With the exodus of his children, he felt ancient and unmoored. Too much time to think. He still worked in his machine shop, and Claire slipped over some late afternoons for a quick moment in bed, but even these moments were elusive and ultimately left him more despondent than he had been before. In the end, life with Claire did not last. The expectation the children had visited upon this affair dissipated. “I am incapable of love,” Charles told Claire, and she, though she wanted to, lacked the wherewithal to convince him otherwise.

Over the years that followed, light and shade fell across his memories. A whole history arrives with absolute clarity and then disappears like the sun that comes so rarely into the valley—expectation, and then disappointment. There gradually emerges a series of images, built up over time. A ferry arrives from a distant shore. A boy in shorts makes fast the ropes. A blind man sings a song that is off-key but hints at a ballad that is familiar and haunting, some tune about love and death and mourning. The boy in shorts opens his mouth as if to speak and then becomes a body on a bier that is being carried by the blind man and Charles. A sign appears indicating a name—the Han River. Charles did not tell anybody about these images.

3

LIEUTENANT DAT WAS A SMALL MAN WHO WORKED FOR ROOM 19, a division of the Danang police force that concerned itself with foreigners and religion. Dat was the policeman to whom Ada and Jon had been directed when they first arrived in Danang and he was the man to whom they kept returning. They would meet him in his office and ask if there was any news of their father. Dat would shake his head mournfully and then ask if they needed anything, a guide perhaps, or an evening out on the town.

Jon asked about their father’s valuables. Could they have them? Dat, who had none of Mr. Thanh’s tact or efficacy in English or even kindness, shook his head and said they were being held.

“Why are they being held?” Ada asked. Dat motioned at her legs and said that Ada had no idea how men in Vietnam would view so much bare flesh. She wore shorts and her legs were long. He said that she should wear dresses, or pantaloons.

She said, “Pantaloons?”

She asked at least to see a list of their father’s valuables, and Dat shook his head and said, “No.”

“Were you aware of him?” Ada asked. “Did you see him around town?”

Dat smiled. “There are many tourists that pass through. I cannot be aware of every one.”

“But you were aware of him missing. That’s why you took his things.”

“The hotel contacted me about a foreigner who had not returned to his room for a week. I made some inquiries, determined that this man, your father, was missing, and so I took his personal belongings. They are part of the investigation. Until we know what happened, we must keep his belongings. Do you understand?”

Ada said no, she didn’t understand. She closed her eyes and bit her lip. She hated this man with his officious and oily demeanor, who seemed more interested in telling her how to dress than in looking for a missing foreigner. On this day she had come alone to see Dat because Jon was tired of the nonsense that went on at Room 19. “It’s not even a real room,” he said. “And this Dat isn’t a real policeman. He just smiles at us. I refuse to be humiliated.”

And so Ada sat on a wooden chair before a wooden desk that held a single object, a letter opener with a black handle. Dat leaned back and studied her. He asked where her brother was, wasn’t he concerned for her safety?

“Was there a letter?” Ada said. “Written to us, or to someone else?”

“No letter.” Dat offered his empty palms.

“And so you’re still looking for my father? You’re going out and asking people and sending out information and talking to other policemen from other cities?”

“Of course, Miss Ada. Every day.” He lifted a hand as if asking for silence and then said, “He had a lover.”

“What do you mean? A Vietnamese woman?”

“American.”

Ada laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“It does not matter what you think. It matters what is, in fact, true.”

“Who is this woman?”

“I cannot say.”

“Because you don’t know.”

“You are sometimes rude, Miss Ada. You think that you are always right, or that I am perhaps stupid, or that I am a smaller person because I am not as rich as you. This is false. You must not assume to know me.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I’m worried. I’m tired. I am given no information. I just want to know what happened to my father.”

“Of course. And when we are sure about this American, we will talk to her. And then we will talk to you. These things take time. I am all alone and I have other things in my plate.” He smiled, pleased by the words he had chosen. He lit a cigarette and turned to look out the window. Ada saw that she was being dismissed.