behalf.
“How about that,” Hollis said. “And it's called Nine Springs, too?”
“Maybe not really same,” Ah-Chun answered. “For me Huang Quan — something like Yellow Springs, you know — so not really same.”
“That's good.”
“Yes, yes, very good, I think.”
But no sooner had Hollis become well acquainted with Ah-Chun than the heat of summer abated, as did the monthly swap-meet adventures. In late August, he entered Ah-Chun's booth for a final time — except the man never knew he was waiting there, nor did Hollis have an opportunity to rest upon the table (four customers were already ahead of him, each paying for an $8 rub). He took a seat on a foldout chair anyway, using his allotted massage minutes to finish a Diet Pepsi, watching as Ah-Chun was hunched beside the table — meandering digits at the corpulent, freckled neck of a young woman, faint Chinese utterances half whispered beyond understanding.
The vast, passive woman on the table seemed almost unaware of Ah-Chun's presence, and the man's mumbled speech was consumed by the evening crowds, the music and announcements piped from loudspeakers, the hawkers proclaiming specials, Tucson's tongue like a family's incomprehensible argument: Hispanic and Anglo voices melding — a cacophony of tones, though somehow not unpleasant, soaring upward above everything; it was that flow of language, life's currency, which Hollis believed Ah-Chun savored the most. Previously, the man had mentioned that his daughter's wishes to drive him were usually declined, and instead he opted to walk the sidewalks and the streets, to wander among the din of people. He also enjoyed riding transit buses, the portable table crossing the city with him to then stand inside the booth. The only blind man, Ah-Chun had proudly pointed out, offering his services at the weekend swap meet — the only blind Taiwanese man, he was positive, to caress and grasp local skin.
Ah-Chun quickly gyrated his fists between lax shoulder blades, warming flesh, and the woman on the table exhaled deeply, saying, “Mmmm — oh, that's good — yes — ” How odd, Hollis suddenly thought, that one could give such pleasure to a woman he wouldn't ever know, an intimacy shared as teenagers, couples, and baby strollers streamed past his booth. “Right there — yes,” the woman said limply, and never revealed more of herself than those short responses. How strange, an elderly man probably older than her father and prowling hands along her surface for cash — hands like a calming wind she could feel but wouldn't contemplate, hands which had traveled an ocean and throughout the years to relieve her body, pummeling rhythmically against her while something in Mandarin was spoken underneath his breath. Then how alien it must have been for Ah-Chun — ending up in a desert where dryness weathered faces, the ebbing fever of August hung like a vaporous gauze of wool, yet he couldn't discern the many phallic-shaped saguaros or accurately envision the island he had abandoned so long ago.
Still, the man ambled surely from bus to bus — slender cane tapping the ground, folding massage table held at his side — venturing twice a week to his booth, touching multiple forms which didn't usually address him with interest or wonder aloud about where his life had originated, where specifically he had gained the gift of softening hard muscles and pacifying tendons. But if asked, he explained as best he could, mentioning the narrow roads of the Taipei night market, the cheap tile walkways fractured by buried asphalt and, in spots, cupping puddles of rainwater. Hard to comprehend, he would still say, “Always work for me — I work there since I was small,” and perhaps a body would find his story unusual, saying as Hollis once had, “Tell me more.”
Then Ah-Chun's memory crossed the Pacific again, returning home; he inhaled the swap meet, steeping his nostrils with what lingered there — that carnival fragrance transporting him, placing him as a boy near the snake shops, the snake wine, the pickled snakes, the snakes hanging lengthwise at storefronts. About fifty years ago, it had been revealed, he was an apprentice masseur kneading bodies in front of a snake shop, pouring snake oil on shoulder blades and spines. Or maybe it was yesterday, he had said and chuckled — swallowing humidity, breathing a fusion of rain, fish, blood, noodles — hearing water slither into drains, flip-flops on the march, voices haggling; he could smell and recall it easily, could draw its vicinity there.
Now the woman emitted a faint moan as Ah-Chun wriggled an elbow on her thigh, then the two of them sighed together — she with eyelids shut, he with eyes wide open; although he wore sunglasses, even at dusk, and gazed in no particular direction, nor, Hollis imagined, did he often cast his mind toward the land which he had left behind for a better life in the United States, remembering it without any tangible clarity. The woman, too, was blind in her own manner; she couldn't conceive of Ah-Chun awaking from darkness into darkness and, thereafter, continuing outside like a somnambulist. She couldn't picture him shuffling on sidewalks until he slowed, his legs aching, or envisage him sleeping at bus stops, stirring confused amidst an abrupt fuming of exhaust, coughing and briefly unsure if he was conscious. No, Hollis thought, why should she care what it's like to come from someplace distant, a far-off homeland, settling in a remote desert, but not perceiving, either, where you've been and where you are — yet somehow finding yourself existing in both.
In spite of that, Ah-Chun's hands kept roaming, investigating, getting the lay of familiar terrain, the way the blind journey inside their apartments extending nimble, grasping fingers always ahead of themselves as if expecting surprises. And gradually the woman fell asleep while the drifting crowds floated through the evening; soon the booths and radiant avenues of the swap meet would turn vacuous. Until then, Ah-Chun continued mumbling to himself; perhaps he felt his own body desiring to stay longer — and from the sinews of that woman, perhaps he could touch the shapes of his past, understanding that today's skin was no different than yesterday's skin. In darkness, he had once told Hollis, a man can belong almost anyplace.
“That's true,” Hollis had replied, shutting his eyes on the table. “You're right,” he had muttered, before losing himself in an unprolonged though hardly insubstantial summer dream; for he was also beckoned elsewhere — departing once while stretched out there, slowly pressed back through time and across the Pacific — as fingertips urged him onward, as the warm elasticity of his skin, soothed in the evening, answered Ah-Chun's guiding touch.
7
There were pennies in every pocket of Private Bill McCreedy's olive fatigues, five pennies per pocket, treasured like amulets which could ward off bad luck — pressed by durable cloth lining, protecting his skin — as if, hopefully, the copper or steel-covered-in-zinc cents might deflect gook bullets. He liked bragging about the pennies to the other men who served alongside him, smirking while mentioning the importance of his American-minted trinkets and patting his pockets as he spoke: “These babies keep me more rooted than anything. They keep me reminded of why I'm here, what I'm fighting for.” But even if he had never said a word, the significance he attached to the coins would have been hard to miss: before falling asleep at the bivouac spot southwest of P'ohang, the pennies were removed and counted and deposited inside a tin drinking cup; after stirring in that humid countryside — encircled mostly by teenage boys, half awake and scratching at their mosquito bites, lowering their feet to the green plastic groundsheets — the pennies were counted again, divided up into tiny stacks of five, and then, mumbling the Lord's Prayer, McCreedy slipped the stacks, one at a time, inside each pocket. Four of the pennies nearest his heart — he had told Hollis and the others — were engraved with the birth years of those waiting for him back home in the States (his mother, his father, his kid brother, and his young girlfriend), while the fifth penny commemorated the year in which he was born.
How distant the Panhandle of Texas must have felt to McCreedy — the cotton rows surrounding the family farm, the red-stone gashes of the Caprock canyons, the wide-open spaces which comprised the high, dry plains; how remote and dreamlike it all must have seemed when first riding by truck among South Korea's lush, mountainous scenery: the soldiers having caught glimpses of an impoverished countryside — village shacks tilting at the edge of hazy fields which were dotted with half-naked laborers, bone-thin dogs roving in packs on the roadway, sullen Korean faces watching as the military trucks rolled past — while far beyond the mountains, a hundred or so miles away, fellow soldiers were already dying beside the banks of a fast-flowing river, some drowning, too, when crossing the rushing stream to escape an onslaught of North Korean troops. For McCreedy, however, it wasn't yet the grim reality of battle which had immediately repulsed him, nor was it the possibility of a violent end which initially troubled his mind; instead, it was the ceaseless stench rising from the fields which wrinkled his brow, the noxious odor of human excrement combined with ash and used as fertilizer.
