Derek managed a car wash in the west end of the city. Good weather or bad, six or seven men would by turns be shivering from the cold or wet, rubbing cars down with wet rags, lit cigarettes in their hands to keep them warm. Over the years Derek hired an assortment of the city’s down and out, men who had the good fortune of being the latest wave of immigrants: Sikhs, Caribbeans, Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, Russians, and Somalis. Somalis and Ethiopians now made up the majority of the crew. Two old Caribbean men and one Ukrainian had been with the shop even before Derek. Most days Derek sat in the small warm kiosk taking money from the customers while the crew ran the cars through the wash and then wiped them to a shine. That is, unless a pretty woman came to get her car done. Then Derek would come out, ordering the crew to make sure that her car was waxed well and all the running boards wiped. He would turn on the charm, holding her by the shoulder and giving her a free coupon and his assurances that she could call him any time, come by any time; managing to get her phone number and, if she was married, implying all the while that she may not be happy and that he was available to talk or have a coffee. Derek’s game was a quick and slippery charm. In the middle of the oil-stained, deluged, smelly car wash, among the ruggedly dressed, rough-handed, broken-faced men, Derek was immaculate, well dressed, and sweet smelling. He always exuded the lover, the charmer.
Walking toward the car wash and seeing him standing with the men, pointing to the hood of a car, Nadine felt a wave of both desire and revulsion pass through her. Yes, she had loved Derek for this very thing, his virility, his easy lust. And here it was, more than twenty years later, still intact despite everything that had happened.
Derek was startled when he turned to go back to the kiosk and saw her. He hurried toward her, assuming she had come to make a scene and to squelch it before she did so in front of the men. He turned a smile on her as he would a customer and made a grand embrace as the crew would expect him to behave toward his wife. The crew, today a Sri Lankan, the two old Caribbean men, and the two young Somalis, looked on appreciatively. Derek called, to one of the older man, “Roger, take over the kiosk for me. I’m going to take my wife to lunch.” Then he checked his pockets for his keys and guided Nadine to his car.
“I want you to go get your son out of jail, Derek.”
“Get in the car, Nadine.”
“I mean it, Derek. I’m tired of this … tired with you now.” She sounded exhausted.
“You see what that girl did to my car, Nadine?” He showed her the scoring around the body. She looked at him pitifully.
“It’s nowhere near what you did.” Something in her tone told him this would not be their usual bickering.
“Do what you have to do. I’m done,” she said before he turned the key in the ignition.
Quy
It’s late spring in this city. Seasons mean nothing to me. Money is my season. Korea beat Italy. You never know, they could beat Germany next. But I doubt it. That Teutonic bunch have no creativity, but they have order. I’m the opposite. Sometimes I think I haven’t the heart for another city. It’s just that I haven’t the bones to reach my hand into another set of lives, feel the sweat of stupid dreams.
What am I doing here, anyway? Well, I lost the compass for knowing where I was long ago, I suppose. So it’s useless asking who I am. You’re more interested in how I got off of Pulau Bidong. How I got here and how grateful I am. How I know the alleyways that lead to the back doors of Chinatown in this city. What if I told you that there’s a web of people like me laying sticky strings all over the city?
You want to know how a person like me could get into such esoteric matters. After all, what pause would I have between scuffling off a boat in the South China Sea, the eternal boat to Pulau Bidong. Get this, a person like me gets to know things. And if you were a boy like me, you’d wise up soon enough to the way things get told and what the weight of telling is.
Well, I was rescued by monks from Pulau Bidong, and they had a good thing—begging. I shaved my head and put on a brown robe and learned to solicit alms on the mainland. We were like a gang, like any conglomerate of businessmen. We had territory, we had monopolies, we had wars, we had alliances, until a schism broke out between the monk who was my father, an ascetic with an opium habit, and a high-tech monk with a laptop computer, a Web site, and a dream of expansion into America.
I was fed up with Loc Tuc. The other side was more promising than that black hole of an opium high. The Dong Khoi had freed me of allegiances. By this time I was a bone of a man, my body looked older than my face. My face always saves me; I’m told it has the innocence of a child’s. That face remained with me. I myself don’t recognize it when I look at it in the mirror. Who is that? I ask. That clear-eyed weepy boy, the waiting look, innocent, innocent like a banded kingfisher. I’ve managed to change everything except that face. It’s waiting for
