Fire Summer Read online

  “She’s rather pallid,” said the woman carved from white marble to a red-haired girl. The woman was sitting coyly on a lotus blossom, her thin stone legs dangling over its petals.

  “Soaked like a field mouse,” Xuan mumbled and stripped off her wet clothes. He took off his shirt, and using it like a cloth, he tried to pat her dry. He pulled her hair back and placed a sweaty palm over her forehead. He then put his ear on her chest and listened for a minute. He left suddenly, his footsteps fading. Moments later when he returned, he wrapped her in a cool cottony sheet.

  “I’d never be caught in yellow,” the red-haired girl said to the white marble woman. She fingered her polished bob. She was suited in black armor. “Couldn’t he find something else to cover her?” She hoisted her spear and leapt from the lantern onto a golden dragon. They floated across the blue starlit ceiling.

  Xuan pressed hard against her chest and released, pressed and released, making her insides coil and tumble in painful waves. He pinched her nose and blew warm smoky breath into her.

  “I was once a man,” the marble woman said. “Did you know I was a man a thousand years ago?”

  “I think I am a man; therefore, I am,” claimed the chap with a head full of chestnut curls. He spoke deliberately to no one in particular.

  “I’m with you. Whatever you are, I’m with you.” A voice reassured him, echoing in her head, but she couldn’t see the speaker. It wasn’t the bald gent with an egg-shaped face, for he was arguing with another bald fellow who wouldn’t look at him but peered instead into the distance. Two elders in flowing imperial gowns, half-listening to their argument, grumbled about three submissions and four virtues.

  Xuan pried her mouth open and poked a finger down her throat. He straddled her and resumed pressing on her chest, hard and fast. He breathed into her mouth and scolded her for swallowing too much dead water, coaxing her not to keep it in.

  The red-haired girl in black armor was playing with the dragons and piercing clusters of white clouds with her spear. The man with the egg-shaped face smirked. “To be or not to be.”

  “Fine words. Fine words,” commended the elder in the blue imperial gown. “Then again, fine words don’t necessarily mean true virtue.”

  “Impossible!” exclaimed the man who was peering into the distance. “Impossible without a violent revolution.” He looked down at her.

  She wanted to agree but her throat was blocked. Her lips trembled.

  The red-haired girl was making rainclouds with the tap of her spear.

  Lightning struck.

  Voices thundered, and the rain came, rapping against the tile roof and glass windows, splashing cold beads onto her face.

  “Accept, child. Let things go their own way. Don’t impose your will on nature.” A soothing voice coaxed her into a float-like sleep like a boat adrift at sea until she shuddered and coughed and waves of water surged from her body.

  “Ah, the girl is awake.” Xuan was sitting on his haunches beside her. He wiped the corners of her mouth with the back of his hand. “Get dressed. I’ll be outside.”

  At the door, he called, “Nous partons, adieu Oncle!”

  A Vietnamese voice croaked back, “Vous fermerez la porte, s’il vous plaît.”

  Maia reached for her clothes and saw the jade locket in the pile. She tore a thin strip of the yellow curtain, drew it through the locket, and tied it around her neck. She put on her damp clothes and became aware of the raw welts around her wrists and ankles.

  Light slanted through the holes and cracks in the lattice windows along the walls. At the center of each window, a left eye set in a triangle stared out. Apart from an old sweeper grumbling in French about the persistent dust blown in from outside, the temple was deserted under the glowing lantern suspended from the ceiling.

  Xuan’s eyes fell on her locket when she emerged on the steps. “You shouldn’t carry the dead with you,” he said.

  At the foot of the mountain, they found the Honda Dream intact, except for a missing rearview mirror. The fruit boy was nowhere in sight. The motley tents had been taken down, and the wind dispersed traces of what remained, only an imprint of the crate and camel tracks were left on the ground.

  The trail along the lotus ponds through the rubber forest to the highway had turned into muddy rivulets after the rain. Xuan had not uttered a word to her since they left the mountain. He muttered to himself, his mouth moving ani matedly, as if to assure his points would get across. She could not make out his speech, even leaning forward, but smelled smoke and the drizzling jungle, sometimes a musky pine.

  She held onto him as they picked up speed. The wind stung the welts on her wrists and ankles. Bright colors and long leaf-shaped eyes appeared, and voices whirred in her head. Light and hollow, she slipped into the flowing surroundings along the rain-swept highway. She was a tiny tadpole twirling in a brook, a rice grain ripening in the field beyond, a raindrop on a leaf tip waiting for the sun.

  She was an orphan—no link with the past, no apparent threat to the present regime. This was how the Independent Vietnam Coalition had rationalized her selection as the replacement after Vinnie Huynh’s disappearance. A young woman could pass through Tan Son Nhat International Airport more easily than a man, they had predicted. Her not breaking under a second interrogation proved to them that she could detach herself from her bodily existence and be still amid the spinning world.

  The ferry was set to leave when Xuan and Maia arrived at a Mekong tributary.

  “Sold out,” the ticket man said. “The next comes at four.”

  He pointed to a cluster of plastic tables and stools beneath the shadow of a tamarind tree where they could wait. On the trunk hung the vendor’s menu painted in a flowing white script: Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang, Dừa Tươi & Bia Hơi.

  They watched the last passengers boarding the ferry. They saw a marble-skinned woman and a red-haired girl. They spotted a chap with a head full of chestnut curls and a bald gentleman with an egg-shaped face and another bald fellow and two elders in blue imperial gowns. A middle-aged bearded man with a staff stood apart from the group. The motley travelers wanted free passage for their old camel and wooden crate.

  “Big but not heavy,” said the fruit boy from the mountain. “There’s nothing inside. The empty crate floats, and Charlee swims like a swamp buffalo.” The boy led the camel into the red muddy water and climbed atop her hump. They began across the river. The sun glared off the mirror in his hand. Behind them, the ferry lugged the crate that bobbed in and out the Mekong like a remnant of a shipwreck.

  “Foreigners,” the soup lady muttered, “finally rounded up and kicked out.” She set a plate of fresh herbs, chilies, and limes on the table and offered Xuan loose imported cigarettes without names.

  He had ordered three soups, two beers, and a coconut. He placed a soup, beer, and cigarettes before the empty seat between them. He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a lighter, lit a cigarette, and took a long drag.

  Maia watched him from the corners of her eyes as she mixed the noodle, immersing the chopped scallion and cilantro and sliced raw onions into the steaming broth. He appeared less distant. She had first thought his name, which meant “springtime,” was ironic but now seemed almost fitting. She wondered whether it was she who had changed. Maybe it was all that time in the eyeball, all that water she had drunk and coughed up. She knew enough to guard herself against him. He had taken her to the interrogation and pretended to care afterward. In spite of her caution, she felt her inside shifting, like the earth around dormant seeds about to sprout.

  She realized then that he had been talking to her father’s ashes.

  She stirred her soup and watched a shrimp, all curled up, back slit open and tail intact, spin along the edge of the bowl. Calamari cut cylindrically and fish processed into dumplings bobbed around her bamboo chopsticks. She added fresh mint leaves and chili to the bowl, turning the broth red. The soup filled her mouth, rushed down her throat, and warmed her.

  “My f
ather doesn’t smoke or drink,” she said.

  “His soul gets lost if you don’t tell him where you’re going.”

  A long, narrow canoe brimming with fruits and vegetables sped past them down the river to the floating market. Beyond, small thatched-roof sampans were anchored some distance apart. They were homes of those who made their living dredging silt from the delta’s riverbed. On a sampan where wisps of smoke rose, a young girl on her haunches cooked the family’s afternoon meal. When she stood up, the wind blew her sun-bleached clothes against her thin body and tousled her shoulder-length hair. She tilted into the wind like a carved figurehead guiding the sampan.

  “During the war, we didn’t sing quan hò and fall in love in the field,” Xuan said. “We followed the Party’s three delays.”

  If you don’t have a child, delay having one.

  If you aren’t married, delay getting married.

  If you aren’t in love, delay love.3

  “Did you?” Maia asked.

  “The trail had just been bombed,” Xuan said, “so our unit spent the night at a way station. She was sixteen with eyes like longan seeds. She was scrubbing white cloths against a river boulder when we arrived. I offered her the sandalwood soap my mother had given me. She tossed me a marble stone from the river. I strung my hammock for her, but she said I needed the rest. The following night, she guided us through the jungle, white cloth flitting through the trees like fireflies.”

  The loud popping noise of a tugboat’s engine signaled people to gather at the riverbank. They rolled up their pants legs and waded into the murky water with bundles of fruits and vegetables. A pickup truck with a mound of red dirt, an old sky blue Vanagon, motorcycles of various models, and rusty bicycles all jostled forward as the ramp lowered. Xuan pushed the Honda Dream onto the ferry, signaling her to keep close. They wedged themselves between a motorcycle with a brace of ducks tied by their feet from the handlebars and a bicycle with a basketful of rambutans on the rear rack. As the tugboat pulled the barge across the river, a cool breeze touched Maia’s cheeks. The breeze bore the smells of the Nine Dragons and the people around her. Their skin, eyes, and hair resembled hers. She was among her people, yet she felt a world away.

  Nearby, a blind man strummed on a recycled aluminum guitar and sang “Nắng Chiều,” a prewar ballad of late afternoon light. A woman hawked bright fiery flowers, whose ethereal scent intermingled with the pungent living river. “Flowers from Sadec,” she called, weaving through the crowd and coming up to Xuan. “A yellow rose for the girl?”

  Xuan bought a bouquet of white chrysanthemums, which the woman wrapped in a decade-old sheet of newspaper and then placed in the Honda Dream’s front basket.

  “Flowers for the dead,” he murmured.

  They ferried across the Mekong.

  Returning

  “WHO’D BUY FLOWERS from the dead?”

  “The dead.”

  “For—?”

  “The living.”

  “Vô duyên!” the woman scolded Hai.

  Slit-throat, the rooster, scatted behind the starfruit tree that shaded part of the garden from the early morning sun.

  “Đi! Đi!” Hai chuckled. “She can kill you twice.”

  Slit-throat stretched his neck around the tree, keeping an eye on the woman.

  “It’s the living that buy flowers for the dead,” the woman explained and continued on the pebbled footpath through the overgrown garden, a pair of butterfly shears in her hand.

  “The dead should buy flowers for the living,” Hai said. Crippled legs entwined in a sitting lotus, he scooted along with his bony arms, trailing his sister-in-law. The rooster followed a safe distance behind. As they approached the row of dwarf Ochna integerrima, each planted in a shallow earthen planter, they saw myriad green buds. “You pinched the leaves before we left!”

  On a bonsai whose thick trunk bent and curved, an early blossom bloomed. The woman got on her haunches and gazed at the small yellow flower, murmuring, “Hoàng Mai.”

  “Luck, harmony, and balance for Lunar New Year.” Hai carefully picked the twigs and dried leaves with insects from the planter and threw them onto the ground for the rooster.

  The woman began to prune the miniature mai. The pair worked quietly down the row of Ochna integerrima amid the garden full of voices of men playing Chinese chess by the man-made fishpond, women drawing water from the well under the guava tree, and children playing hide-and-seek among the purple dragon fruit.

  “Let the boys sell these at the Tết market downtown,” Hai said again. “It’s extra money for the road.”

  The woman’s hand trembled with the butterfly shears in midair.

  “We can transport eight bonsai in the van. One Arm, the mechanic, single-handedly fixed the van, didn’t I tell you?” Hai chuckled at his own joke. “And Squinty, the driver, is only half-blind in one eye.”

  Sometime after the curfew siren, after Ox Alley dimmed its lights, the woman left her bed to find her way to the family’s ancestral altar. She could hear Hai and the boys in the garden, loading the yellow mai flowers onto her husband’s old Vanagon. Bare feet on the cold cement floor made her shiver in her thin cotton đồ bộ. In the dark she felt for the matchbox, struck a light, and burned three incense sticks. The jasmine fragrance filled the airy room. She fell on her knees, clasped her hands in prayer, and chanted.

  Nam mô A-di-đà Phật.

  Nam mô A-di-đà Phật.

  Nam mô A-di-đà Phật.

  She had been home since the night before. Nothing was unpacked, the red basket full of jars and bottles left in a corner of the room, the furniture still covered in dust. It was three days before the Year of the Rooster.

  As her prayer merged with the night sounds from the garden, the creases on her forehead relaxed. Barely thirty, she had the gravity of an older woman. After her father was imprisoned and mother became frail, she traveled between the highlands and the coast, carrying merchandise to trade. She had cared for her parents and younger sister.

  Now, she had a family of her own.

  Dawn blushed against the cottony sky and cast shadows across the overgrown garden. The woman’s prayer grew faint. Wisps of smoke curled and disappeared as the sun rose. She felt alone, as on those nights before traveling, but then she knew she would come back to the garden, to the L-shaped house, to her husband and daughter. This time, she was leaving to follow the path of returning.

  Two

  A Wake

  BRIGHT CIRCLES GLOWED against night shadows. The three-story house with glass windows reflecting the red evening sky seemed out of place in the wetland of the Mekong Delta.

  “That’s the public security chief’s house,” the reedy old boatman said. He tied the canoe to a nipa palm beside the dock and scrutinized Maia. “How are you related to Chief Mao, if I may ask?”

  “Everyone’s related,” Xuan said.

  The boatman held onto the mangrove to steady the canoe for them to disembark.

  Na, who had arrived earlier with JP and No-No, was waiting on the dock. When she saw Xuan with the chrysanthemums, she said, “You knew?” and waved him ahead on the rickety plank boardwalk toward the house where people in white mourning gathered.

  Maia felt as if she had been drawn into a stage production. The address on her grandmother’s letter had led her to a garden where her childhood home had once stood, now the Winter Night Café. She had come to the River of Nine Dragons, where she was told her grandmother and aunt had relocated.

  Na took her hand and led her to a redbrick well to wash up. On a nearby platform sat a large earthen jar, plastic basins, and a tin bucket with a rope to draw water. The mossy deck had room for a person to wash dishes or do the laundry and hang the clothes to dry on the line that strung from the outhouse to the wild banana grove.

  “You’ve come just in time for your grandmother’s wake,” Na whispered. She helped Maia don a white hooded tunic.

  An ensemble of drawn-out wails came from the hous
e.

  “Hired mourners,” Na said. “The Public Security Trio. Your uncle-in-law Mao also invited a camel troupe. They pitched their tents behind the house.”

  In the shadows, Maia could see the outline of a camel grazing by a waterway and a small stooped figure stroking the animal’s immense bowed head.

  The Maos had moved from Ho Chi Minh City with both widowed mothers-in-law to the swampland, where they cultivated varieties of ornamental and edible cacti. Once a week, they returned to the city to oversee the café and altar shop. On ghost festivals, death anniversaries, and funerals, they invited neighbors and friends nearby and relatives from afar, who arrived and left the secluded lot by boat.

  Shrouded in white, Maia followed Na to the house. They passed local folks in everyday clothes and the travelers in motley attire. People milled about in the marshy front yard and on the open veranda. Xuan joined JP talking with the red-haired girl and the marble-skinned woman. They stood off by the orchard that stretched from the house down to the inconstant river. The tall sprawling cacti, each planted in a mound of dirt piled up from the swamp, were laden with dragon fruit and night blooming flowers.

  “She’s rather pallid,” Maia murmured, watching Xuan bow to the marble woman.

  “That’s Lady Mercy,” Na said, but her eyes were on JP, who was trifling with the red-haired girl.

  On a grassy hillock, a middle-aged man with a carved serpent staff spoke to the crowd. “Some passed too early; many, too late,” he said. “The old orchard keeper passed at the right time.” The man tapped his staff, and No-No leaped and pounced on the serpent that coiled midway around the rod. The orange kitten bit into the serpent tail, dangling back and forth like a circus acrobat before letting go.

  Na left Maia in the incense-filled house.

  In the living room packed with people in white hooded tunics, Comrade Ty kept time by striking the brass gong, punctuating the low rumbling of fat Pâté and the high wailing of Cross-eyed Lai. Amid the hired mourners’ rhythmic howling and thick smoke lay the small withered body of her grandmother on the rosewood dining table. Maia searched for traces of familiarity. Her grandmother’s mask-like face revealed nothing. She looked around at her relatives, mute figures swathed in white. How could it be that she arrived on the night of her grandmother’s wake?