“Good,” Marcus said, turning the volume up again, the way one of the boys would around midnight, on his transistor radio, when everyone knew but wouldn’t say that sleep was impossible. Liem’s eyes were closed by then, but he couldn’t help seeing the faces of men he knew casually or had watched in the tea bar, even those of his own roommates. In the darkness, he heard the rustle of mosquito netting as the others masturbated also. The next morning, everyone looked at each other blankly, and nobody spoke of what had occurred the previous evening, as if it were an atrocity in the jungle better left buried.
He thought he’d forgotten about those nights, had run away from them at last, but now he wondered if the evidence still existed in the lines of his palms. He rubbed his hands uneasily on his jeans as they drove through a neighborhood with bustling sidewalks, trafficked by people of several colors. They were mostly whites and Mexicans, along with some blacks and a scattering of Chinese, none of whom looked twice at the signs in the store windows or the graffiti on the walls, written in a language he’d never seen before: peluquería, chuy es maricón, ritmo latino, dentista, iglesia de cristo, viva la raza!
After turning onto a street lined with parked cars jammed fender-to-fender, Marcus swung the sedan nose-down into the sloping driveway of a narrow two-story house, upon whose scarlet door was hung, strangely enough, a portrait of the Virgin Mary. “We’re home,” Parrish said. Later Liem would learn that Parrish was an ambivalent Catholic, that the district they lived in was the Mission, and that the name for the house’s architectural style was Victorian, but today all he noticed was its color.
“Purple?” he said, never having seen a home painted in this fashion before.
Parrish chuckled and opened his door. “Close,” he said. “It’s mauve.”
Mrs. Lindemulder had squeezed Liem’s shoulder in the San Diego airport and warned him that in San Francisco the people tended to be unique, an implication he hadn’t understood at the time. Every day for the first few weeks in Parrish’s house, Liem wanted to phone Mrs. Lindemulder and tell her she’d made a huge mistake, but Parrish’s generosity shamed him and prevented him from doing so. Instead, he stood in front of the mirror each morning and told himself there was nobody to fear, except himself. He’d silently said the same thing last year, at summer’s end in ’74, when he bade farewell to his parents at the bus station in Long Xuyen. He hadn’t complained about being dispatched alone to Saigon, several hours north, where he’d be the family’s lifeline. As the eldest son, he had duties, and he was used to working, having done so since leaving school at the age of twelve to shine the boots of American soldiers.
He’d known them since he was eight, when he began picking through their garbage dumps for tin and cardboard, well-worn Playboy magazines, and unopened C rations. The GIs taught him the rudiments of English, enough for him to find a job years later in Saigon, sweeping the floor of a tea bar on Tu Do Street where the girls pawned themselves for dollars. With persistence, he sandpapered the two discourses of junkyard and whorehouse into a more usable kind of English, good enough to let him understand the rumor passed from one foreign journalist to another in the spring of ’75, six months ago. Thousands would be slaughtered if the city fell to the Communists.
In April, when rockets and mortars began exploding on the outskirts of the city, the rumor seemed about to come true. Although he hadn’t planned on kicking, shoving, and clawing his way aboard a river barge, he found himself doing so one morning after he saw a black cloud of smoke over the airport, burning on the horizon, lit up by enemy shellfire. A month later he was in Camp Pendleton, San Diego, waiting for sponsorship. He and the other refugees had been rescued by a Seventh Fleet destroyer in the South China Sea, taken to a makeshift Marine Corps camp at Guam, and then flown to California. As he lay on his cot and listened to children playing hide-and-seek in the alleys between the tents, he tried to forget the people who had clutched at the air as they fell into the river, some knocked down in the scramble, others shot in the back by desperate soldiers clearing a way for their own escape. He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.