Waylaid (8 page)

His wife went to work cleaning houses while Frank stayed at home and drank. She took the kid with her to work when she realized that Frank fed him too much and never changed the diapers.

Frank started drinking heavily. His wife had to drive farther and farther to find houses to clean. He drank more and more. He couldn't stop. He never felt hungry. One day, his wife never came back. He didn't know where she or his son were. He could pass them in the street now and he wouldn't know who they were.

The government wanted to move Frank into a facility, but he refused to go. He applied for disability instead, using the checks for drinks. Then they cut him off. Years later, the Army found him again and gave him a lump-sum payment for veterans' benefits.

Now here he was, 30 years after Korea, still giving money to Koreans for cheap rooms.

“I'm not Korean, I'm an American,” I said. That set him off.

“You haven'd erned da righd do call yourself an American undil you fighd for diss coundry! None of you people ever did shid for America! You only come here do dake our money! And led me dell you, we have courdesy in diss coundry. Yes we do. You see dad couch over dere?” He pointed to the office couch. “I never sad down dere and you people never invided me do sid. You see an old man like me wid my leg like diss, and you don even invide me do sid down!” Frank's whole body shook as he yelled, and his voice was unnaturally strong for his frail body. Then he glared at me and wobbled out of the office.

Frank stopped talking to me after that. If he knew I was around, he would come into the office, put his rent money on the counter, ring the bell, and leave.

The next time I cleaned Frank's room, I opened the suitcase that he kept under his bed. Inside was a Playboy from the 1960s.

As I picked it up, small round clippings slipped from the pages and fluttered to the floor. Picking up the pieces of paper, I broke into a sweat. They were women's faces, clipped from advertisements and fashion magazines. He'd made that old Playboy issue last by placing new faces on top of the nude bodies. Some of the faces were those of young children, boys and girls.

By November, Mr. Hendrickson got too lazy to go down the hall to grade our tests. The weekly quizzes were scored electronically. He handed out computerized forms and we'd bubble in our answers with number two pencils. We didn't even write anymore, we just filled in Chinese-eye ovals on those forms. I forgot how to write cursive letters that weren't in my name.The tests would then be fed into the computer in the teacher's lounge. They would come back out with green dashes next to incorrect numbers and the final score printed out in crude dot-matrix numbers that made 1's, 7's, and 9's all look alike. The forms would be handed back without a single written comment on them. No sexy, curvy one-liners like the “Excellent!s” that Miss Creach used to write.

“My best student in the class will be in charge of grading,” Mr. Hendrickson said. He held up a card.

“Here is the best student!” he bellowed, then called my name. I'd gotten a 99 on the big social-studies test from a month ago. Crispy punched my arm.

“You asshole! I got a 60!” he said.

“No talking!” yelled Mr. Hendrickson, as he walked between the rows of desks handing back test forms. He grunted as he bent over to read student's names from the tags on the front of their desks.

“You got what you deserved, stupid,” I whispered to Crispy. I looked across the room at Lee Anderson.

“Uh, oops,” Mr. Hendrickson said, holding another card up. “Actually, it's a tie for top student!” He called Lee Anderson. “One hundred percentile!” Then he handed her test back. She's beautiful, she's got tits, and she's smart, I thought.

Lee's friends giggled and patted her. She was surrounded by so many girls all the time, it was nearly impossible to talk to her just one-on-one. I hadn't been able to say more than Hello without thinking I sounded stupid.

Crispy raised his hand. “Mr. Hendrickson, it's not a tie. He got a 99 and Lee got a hundred.”

Mr. Hendrickson whirled around and yelled, “Shut up, you!” Then he calmed down and said, “These two are now in charge of grading your tests. I'm delegating my duties here so I can work more efficiently.” He looked at me and Lee. “As for the two of you, you can watch each other to make sure there's no cheating.”

He gave me the key to the teacher's lounge and handed a stack of our last three weekly tests to Lee.

We walked out the door as the class made kissy sounds behind us. I saw Mr. Hendrickson take off his glasses, and I knew they were in for it.

The lounge consisted of a shelf with a sink next to a refrigerator with a sign on it that said, “Label your lunch or lose it.” It stunk of cigarettes like some of our hotel rooms. It was empty now, since the teachers only hung out there at lunch time. Bright fluorescent lights gave a dull shine to the scuffed tile floor. A copy machine hummed in a corner next to a computer grader that looked like a change machine at an arcade.

You had to feed in the answer key first, so the computer would know which answers were right, which were wrong, and the total number of answers. What Mr. Hendrickson didn't realize — or didn't care about—was that I was changing my forms to match the answer key. I was changing Lee's answers, too. I was used to working with tables and charts from the hotel records about which rooms were being rented for how long, so lining up the answer key, my test, and Lee's test, and erasing and filling in appropriately was easy.

At first, I was nervous around Lee. I didn't know what to say or do, so I talked about stupid things. I told her I wanted to be an astronaut.

“You're really smart,” Lee said. “I bet you'd be a great astronaut.”

“You're really smart, too. You get the same grades I do.”

“That's because we're both cheating on the tests.”

“Hendrickson has no idea what we're doing in here,” I said. Lee opened the refrigerator.

“We could eat his lunch and drink his beer!” she said.

“You know, Lee, I remember when you drank beer in fourth grade and fell asleep.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, laughing. “My dad mixed up our Thermoses.”

“You, you have the most beautiful eyes, Lee,” I told her. She smiled.

“Thank you.”

“And you've got such a sweet smile, too.” Her lips parted, and she ducked her head down like she wanted me to scratch an itchy spot on her scalp. Those were the dumbest, most common things to say, but they worked. I was in.

That night, a power surge reset our alarm clocks, leaving a flashing “EE:EE” in bright red on the numerical faces. I was curled up, straddling my pillow, when I saw a semicircle of light on the ceiling around the chipped light fixture. It was usually still dark when the alarm went off. What time was it?

Panicked, I sat up and looked at the electronic alarm clock on my night stand. “HEE HEE,” it read. I dashed to the office in bare feet. The hands of the Marlboro Man clock, which ran on a size-C battery, pointed to 8:21 — 21 minutes after attendance was taken. My mother and I had both overslept.

I ran into my parent's bedroom to wake up my mother.

“Aye, yo, Jesus, my God,” she said, pulling on a bathrobe. My father grumbled and turned over on his side. “Get the car keys! They in Daddy's pants pockets!” My father's chinos dangled limply on the stubby bedpost like a lowered flag. I stumbled in the dim light, stepping into a bowl filled with peanut shells that felt like broken glass on my bare feet. I let out a cry of pain and fell to the floor.

“Come on, you stupid! You late for school, you still fooling around! Still hokey pokey around!” my mother yelled. I brushed the shells off my feet. “You go change, I go warm up car,” she called after me as I went to my bedroom and pulled on my already-tied sneakers. I was still wearing yesterday's corduroy slacks and a Sea-Shore Linen Supply t-shirt. I could handle the inevitable taunting for wearing the same clothes two days in a row, but my body felt gross. There wasn't even time for me to shower. My hair flopped over like worn-out bristles on an old toothbrush.

I ran to the bathroom sink and threw handfuls of water over my face. Now my hair looked like a worn-out toothbrush that was also wet. I pulled on a Mets sweat-jacket and a Mets baseball cap, both of which had been left by a Benny. On my way out of the office door, I hung up the closed sign and locked the door.

My wet face and neck stung from the cold in the morning air. My breath plumed from my nose and mouth.

My mother was already in the car. A cloud of frozen exhaust materialized beneath our straining Pinto, obscuring the wheels and making it look like a futuristic hovercraft. Then the motor died. My mother frantically jerked the ignition. I couldn't help but laugh at her feeble attempts to start the car.

She got out, her hands pulling the flaps of her bathrobe closed because the belt was missing. “You laughing me? You going walk to school!” she hissed. I didn't know if her teeth were clenched in anger or from the cold.

“Can't I just stay home and say I was sick?”

“No, you going go school! You don't want learn? You lazy?”

“If I walk to school, I'm going to freeze to death!”

“Not so cold!” Our breath mingled and spiraled up.

“It's so cold, the car won't even start!”

“Car didn't sleep late!”

“The power got knocked out!”

“Always have some excuse…you get up same time every day, don't you?”

“You didn't wake up either!”

“I have to work so hard every day, of course I'm tired!” My mother, still in Chinese house slippers, was shifting from foot to foot in a disco-step display of stubbornness to stay out in the cold and argue with her son. My body temperature rose with my anger, and I wasn't feeling the cold anymore.

“I don't get to sleep at night! I rented out two rooms for hookers last night.” The words were out. Every letter in H-O-O-K-E-R-S sparkled and pranced in the air like tinsel streamers. My mother took a deep breath and swallowed.

“You going walk to school!” she seethed.

“I'll call a cab.”

“They open 9:30.”

“Then I'll wait until 9:30.”

“You not going wait. You start walking now!”

“I'm going to ask Roy for a ride,” I said. My mother gasped.

“You going ride with a black?”

“Why not?”

“You going be killed! They going find your body! You want to die!”

“I'm going to die if I walk!” She fumed. H-O-O-K-E-R-S was still glimmering about two inches away from my mouth.

“Good! Go ride with the black!” My mother stormed to the office. She seemed surprised when she found the door locked. “Stupid kid, you go die!” she called over her shoulder as she fumbled with the keys and unlocked the office door.

I slammed the door to the Pinto and walked to Room 8, where Roy lived. Roy, who looked like he was about 40, was the youngest guy who stayed at the weekly rate. He was also the only non-white at the hotel, besides us.

My mother had two rules: no customers in our living quarters and no renting to blacks.

“Those blacks, they dirty, they steal everything,” she explained. I saw only one or two blacks at the hotel a year, and I'd always tell them there were no vacant rooms. They seemed to know what was going on. Roy got to stay because he paid for the entire winter in advance, instead of week to week or hour by hour, like all the other customers.

Roy had been hurt in Vietnam, and he walked by swaying his hips and swinging his legs out in front of him. His head was shaved smooth, and he had a neatly trimmed mustache and beard that looked like velvet against his dark brown skin. It was hard for him to stand straight because of his injury, but he seemed to be of about medium height and build.

Roy stayed in his room working on speeches and poetry most of the time. I could hear the typewriter going sometimes, but I never saw it. The first time I cleaned his room, I was startled. Not by how well-kept it was, but by its bareness. All his belongings were in two padlocked suitcases under the bed. His typewriter and socks — even his razors and shampoo. Another strange thing was that his wastebasket was always empty.

Roy and I didn't talk much, especially compared with the conversations I was forced to have with the white old timers, who were stuffed into the hotel like clothes in storage. If it was an unseasonably warm day, Roy would prop his room door open with the hotel Bible and sit on his chair outside. One day when he was hanging out, he called to me as I was walking back to the office from the school bus stop.

“Hey, what did you learn in school?”

“I learned about the Greeks,” I said.

He shrugged and said, “It's all Greek to me!”

Another time, he'd shown me an issue of Reader's Digest. They had printed one of his poems.

“Here, read this, tell me what you think,” he said. “They paid me $300 for it.”

It was a short thing, maybe 10 words long, and it rhymed. It didn't mean anything to me. I forgot it as soon as I read it.

“I…I don't know,” I said.

“There's different layers of meaning in poetry,” he said, smiling. “And I guess they missed one of them when they decided to print it! There's different layers of meaning in life, too.” He paused. “Now, what are you? You're Chinese, right?”

“I'm an American.”

He screwed his face up.“Don't come on like that. I'm an American, too. But I'm black first. Like you're Chinese first.”

“I don't know.”

“You ever been to China?”

“Nope.”

Roy cackled. “I'm a black man, never been to Africa. Never going to Africa. I saw enough in Vietnam and I read enough to know that some of your own kind treat you worse than anyone else. Take advantage of you more than anyone else. Your own kind. Know what I'm saying?” I nodded. I had no idea what he was saying.

He pointed down to the space between his cowboy boots. “This is the best life you can get anywhere. The

U.S.A. You can't live anywhere better. That's why your parents came here. If you were in China, you'd be barefoot and stupid for life. Me, too. But you got a place in this country. It isn't always good, but you've got the chance to improve yourself here.”