years later. He had wandered off into the jungle, confused, or more likely sad. To imagine him as a fugitive in this world was more pleasant than the alternative. There wasn’t really a great visual memory of him left, even right away after he died. Her memory at that time did not include details. But she knew of him, his broad outlines, the roaring energy around him. She liked to think of him as free, as a panther.
If her father was out there hunting the woods of Burma, looking for home, then she was not ever really alone on this earth. He might eventually work things out, and be coming for her. He might be ready to reach out to her at any time. In city traffic, in any passing car, he could be there turning his certain shape of face to the glass, seeking her out. Of course, he would also have his reasons for staying in the shadows. He would need to be cautious. After all, what had happened to him once might happen to him again. There could be consequences to human contact.
She was never able to identify his face in a passing vehicle. But this did not stop her from wondering if her face had captivated other people she saw, men of a fatherly age. She thought she might catch someone’s eye, someone who had never seen a face like hers before. The person might say, “Follow that girl, because I have to know where she lives.” Someone solid and distinguished might show up at the doorstep, fall in love with her mother, and become her new father. Maybe he would turn out to be the same old one after all, wearing a clever disguise. There were men, throughout her life, that were fatherlike. A man with gray hair. A professor who told her,
The tragedy of her father’s absence had never actually been an acutely tragic event for her. As she grew up and came to understand the world, he was a part of it. An already dead part. His absence was the landscape of her family. Increasingly, as the years went on, she didn’t really know what she was missing, but that didn’t stop her from missing it. She fixated on him. She prayed to him. She attempted to research him, found obscure publications of his in scientific journals. The language was so formal, she could barely understand it. But she told herself,
Her belief that her father was still living did not stop her from telling stories about his death. She learned quickly when she started school that having a father who was killed by Communists immediately magnified her fame. Of course in her school she had already gained a certain notoriety from the mere fact of being bald.
In school, she would reference Bob Butcher in passing, and call him “My father who died” or “My father who was killed by Communists” or “My dead father.” There were other children in her middle school whose fathers were gone. There was one other child whose father was dead, of a heart attack, at age forty-five. That poor kid, having stood over his father’s grave, and cried with real tears and snot, was not able to translate this experience into any sort of social status, because he was always coming in with a little dairy farm on his brown shoes, and it didn’t matter to the other kids, whatever thing was festering in him. He could visit his father’s grave, and no one put their arm around him. But there was a lot of curiosity, about Sunny’s family in general, coming from the community. So eventually Sunny was asked, by one of the girls from Foxburg whose families still had money, to tell everyone exactly how her father died, anyway. “What’s the deal with your dad,” said this girl to Sunny. “How did he die anyway?”
Sunny, her social instinct strong even at the age of eleven, was able to deflect. Rather than giving up her mystery in the moment, she was wise enough to say, “Yes, I will tell you, but not today.” She chewed her gum cryptically, rolled her eyes, slammed her locker shut. Then she delivered a brilliant smile, and pushed off down the hall.
“I will tell you,” said Sunny when pressed again by this other local rich girl with a very severe ponytail and curls. “Next week at some point, probably, down by the track. During track practice. Meet me.”
Sunny never did any sports in middle school or high school, but she did watch the track team practice, dutifully, most every day. She had a crush on one of the boys. There were kids coming over, like they always did, waiting for their mothers to pick them up, or skipping out on play practice, or pep band or whatever. But now they would sit there near to Sunny, where she was perched up on the bleachers, watching the distance runners loping around. They looked expectantly at her, but she didn’t have much to say on the matter. Around the middle of the week, someone said, “Well, are you going to tell us pretty soon?” And Sunny said, abruptly, that this would be the day she would tell. She slammed her math notebook shut and put it aside, chewed her pencil absently, then threw it over her shoulder.
“My father died,” she said, “on a plateau. He was high up in Tibet.” The warm breeze blew across the green valley, up from the river. The track was nestled in a little dell, down behind the school. In this land of rolling hills, there was hardly an acre of level ground in the entire county, making swimming pools almost an impossibility. The children around her turned their faces toward her, their skeletons obscured by the shape of their hair. A couple were wearing hats, too. Their butts made the wooden bleachers creak, the chipped green paint getting into the seams of their jeans. “That’s near China,” she added. “Outside.” One of the kids nodded. One of the kids looked at another kid and quietly muttered, “No, it’s not.” The track kids pounded past, another lap of the asphalt counted. Sunny cleared her throat.
“It was winter in Tibet,” she went on, “and the Communists had guns.” Now the kids sat up a bit more and paid attention. Sunny clasped her hands together and turned them inside out, stretching out her elbows. She yawned.
“How many Communists were there?” asked one girl.
“Three,” said Sunny. “There were three Communists, in brown military uniforms. The uniforms of the Chinese Liberation Army of the People’s Democracy. They were supposed to be exterminating all the missionaries, even the ones who had families to support. My father had left us to escape the Communists. He had been hiding in a Buddhist monastery, but when the Communists came to the monastery, they found him there. He was in a dark room, between two clay jars of water. Probably praying or something. They came into the room, and tipped the jars over one by one onto the floor. The clay lids were breaking, water spilling everywhere, all over the place. My father stood up, in the middle of all this breaking pottery and monastery stuff, and said, ‘I’m here.’ And they dragged him out, up the mountain and onto a high flat rock. There were monks, um, dying all around. Getting bayoneted.”
“But what did he do?” asked a boy in red shorts. “Why was he in trouble?”
“For not being a Communist, obviously,” said Sunny kindly, and the other kids looked at this red-shorts kid like he was a complete idiot.
“So they dragged him up there on this high rock, one on each side and one marching behind. That was uncomfortable. And they threw him down on a flat place on the ground. ‘Do you believe in communism?’ they said to him. ‘No,’ said my father. ‘I will never believe in communism!’”
Sunny’s voice echoed across the track. She put up a bony fist and shook it. “They kicked him in the stomach, and began to walk around him in a circle, kicking him. ‘Do you believe in communism?’ they kept saying, but he would always say ‘No!’ and then they would kick him again. Their boots were dry and hard, and they had short legs. But there was no dust around, there’s no dust in Tibet because there is no dirt, only rock. These soldiers, their faces were flat and Chinesey, but really tough and mean. Finally they turned toward him, pointing all their guns right at his head, and they pulled him up so he was kneeling on the rock, and then they shot him. Dead.”
“Holy crap,” said one boy, impressed. A horn honked in the parking lot, as somebody’s mother had arrived. The track team had separated out now, a long trail dripping back from the lead group. At the front of the pack, Sunny watched a long, lean boy with a shaved head run mechanically past. Others followed, breathing hard, marking out another mile.
“In Tibet you can’t bury people,” Sunny went on. “You can’t dig; the rock is too hard. So they chopped him up into pieces with these big steel machetes, and left him there, for the vultures. They didn’t talk while they were doing it, they just kind of chop, chop, chopped. The rock turned all bloody with his blood, making red pools here and there on the rock. And then they went off down the mountain. After the vultures had eaten him, his bones dried, and eventually they blew off that rock, and became just part of the gravel. White bones.”
“How could you even know that,” said the cynic in red shorts.
“Shut up, man!” said the kid next to him, and pushed him off the bleachers.
