Dagou pushes back his chair and picks up his coat.
James is staring miserably at his plate. Clearly, James feels he has failed to be a good brother. Ming himself has no such regret. It is many years since he has tried to help Dagou, longer yet since he has admired him. It’s hard to remember a time when he ever looked up to him.
Still, when Dagou nods at him in farewell, Ming nods back.
Passing James’s seat, Dagou bends down to him, puts a hand upon his shoulder. “Snaggle,” he mutters. Ming leans in close to hear. “Come by later? My place around three o’clock?”
James nods.
The room is silent except for Dagou’s disappearing footsteps. The front door closes almost timidly.
Gu Ling Zhu Chi is still standing, with her steely, blue-eyed handler at her side.
“Leo Chao,” she says. “Big Chao. You are the boss. But it would be to your own advantage to watch behind you. You know what I am talking about. You’re in danger of a bad death.”
Her dry voice, crackling with certitude, is followed by expectant quiet.
Leo only shrugs and picks up his delivery bag. The novices across the table sigh. They think it’s over. But Winnie is still alert and watchful in her chair. Ming doesn’t leave his hunter’s blind. He’s waiting for a parting attack: Leo Chao seldom fails to get in the final word. Now he makes his way across the gymnasium, not seeming to care. He’s almost reached the doors when he stops, opens his bag, and takes out a bulky package wrapped in white paper.
“You can’t say I don’t come ready to give,” he calls out. “I brought special treats!”
He throws the package in the direction of the big gray mutt nearest him.
Ming feels Alf, below the table, raise his head.
The other dogs jump at once to their feet. It’s as if Leo’s thrown a magnet into a box of filings. Ears perk, nostrils twitch, and a high, starved howl breaks into the air. The room explodes with desperate barking. Alf charges out from under the table.
The dogs fight over the bloody package. Their snarling snouts seek out the paper, their teeth snap on air. Their tails whip and brush and dance. Those who can’t get close stand back and whine. From the table, the nuns cry out in protest; the dogs ignore them.
Someone is rushing toward the fray. It’s Winnie, all tranquility forgotten, frantic yet determined to rescue her beloved Alf. Brown robes flying, she plunges into the melee. She seizes Alf by the collar, but Alf wriggles free, and Winnie is left holding the leather band. As Leo Chao opens the doors to step outside, a German shepherd mix seizes the meat and dashes into the swirling snow. Alf rushes after him.
“Alf!” Winnie cries out.
But Leo stands by. “Let him have his fun!” He grins and leaves the building, slamming the doors behind him.
“A Big Fish in a Small Pond”
James remembers it this way: The winter after Ming went east, to college, their mother, now working too hard, came down with a bad cold that turned into pneumonia and sent her to the hospital. Dagou left New York, where he’d been living on kitchen jobs and gigs as a bass player, returned to Haven, and moved into the old family apartment over the restaurant. James’s big brother was in town again, charismatically uncombed and unshaven, loquacious and needy, pressing James into assistance as he cast extraordinary spells of pungent, savory magic in the restaurant kitchen. Reminiscing about New York, dispensing guidance about the world at large. The two of them spent hours and hours watching football and playing video games in the apartment. It was Dagou who took to calling James “Snaggle” (a joke on James’s crooked front tooth and a play on the transliteration “Sangou”) and Dagou who nicknamed their puppy “Alf” (a joke on “Arf”; his given name was Bruce Lee Chao). Dagou took up enough space for two brothers. Although there remained, whenever James thought of Ming, a wordless space, a question mark, a pause.
In midafternoon, as James climbs up the snowy steps to Dagou’s bachelor apartment, he remembers it as a place of refuge. He opens the door with anticipation and nostalgia.
“Snaggle,” his brother’s deep, husky voice emerges from the other room. “Check this out.”
Leaving his wet shoes in the kitchen, James passes the old family bedroom now redone with a luxurious king-sized bed draped with a faux-fur blanket. He enters the old living room, now a darkly glowing, carpeted space, a cave, with walls warmly painted brown, and dimmed wall sconces. From one side hangs a stuffed boar’s head; and on the other side is mounted a screen, slowly humping through a spiral of rich colors. Dagou’s tall bass looms magisterially in a corner. The rest of the room is dominated by an overstuffed leather couch and a glass coffee table with legs of burnished metal. On the table are piles of cookbooks in two languages, and a fortress of electronic equipment, including a mysterious black box.
Dagou, a barefooted bear in a cave, hunches at his laptop, its glow lighting up the high, ruddy contours of his face. James is reminded vividly of their father, sitting with his glass of baijiu in the dark. But Dagou is typing away at the laptop with an air of furious industry.
“Hey, Dagou.”
“Hey, Snaggle!” Dagou moves a pile of red stationery from the couch. James lowers himself into the empty space, and the smell of leather suffuses him; it’s like sitting in an enormous baseball glove. A glass is put into his hand. James sniffs a strong odor of alcohol. Beneath the leather and the alcohol, he can sense the comforting interest his brother has always taken in him, the generous interest of a larger, stronger animal nudging a youngling.
“Come on, try it. Tell me what you think,” says Dagou, pointing at the glass. “I’m bringing out the best stuff for you.”
James takes a sip. “It’s—strong,” he says, his throat burning. It’s not as strong as his father’s baijiu, but he doesn’t say so. He picks up a sheet of red paper.
You are invited to the
Annual Christmas Party!
Delectable dishes!
and special libations by Dagou Chao!
Fine Chao Restaurant
December 24, 6 p.m.
Dagou sticks out his chest. “This year, Ma asked me to take over the food for the Christmas party. Well, I’m planning the best fucking party ever. Ba doesn’t want me as a partner? I’ll show him!”
James remembers the old woman’s warning to Dagou: Stay away from that restaurant. You’re inserting yourself into a story you don’t know. “Who did you invite?”
“I sent these paper invites to Ma’s friends. But now I’m thinking I’ll invite everyone!” Dagou waves his arm in the direction of the equipment on the table.