Life is so much better here. During the year, Carl became involved in basketball, his grades improved. Good people here.
Carl says, “People in school call me a gook.”
Tab’s smile vanishes. “What? Why is this the first time I’m hearing this? Who calls you that?”
“Some of the kids.”
“Which kids?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
“When did they call you this?”
“A bunch of times.” Carl looks at his father, his eyes steady and cold. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want us to move again.”
“You know why we moved.”
“I liked New York. I had friends there.”
“Thugs and hooligans. We live here now. These are good people. Maybe some are ignorant, but soon they’ll see we’re good people, too.” Tab smiles encouragingly at his son. “We’ll survive here. We will, Carl. We’ll survive.”
An aluminum canoe with fading red paint washes up on shore while Tab and Carl cast their lines to the river’s poisonous fish. There is crude lettering on the bow.
“Help me push this out into the river,” Tab says.
“Why don’t we keep it?”
“Because. Maybe someone is waiting for it.”
They slide it over the muddy bank into the water where the current takes hold. It straightens like the needle of a compass, and disappears into the evening’s dim light.
New York. As many people as insects. Ceaseless noise.
But this is where Tab married. Where Carl was born. Where Mina died.
One sweltering night, when Carl was only fourteen, there was a knock on the apartment door. Rare to get visitors. Tab opened the door a crack, leaving the chain attached.
Carl. In handcuffs. Smelling of beer. Cigarettes. A cut on his face. An ugly bruise. Suspended between two policemen.
“This your kid?”
Tab unlatched the chain and opened the door wide. “Yes, this is my son.”
“We saw him jump out of a van, throw a punch at a college student. When we intervened, the van took off.”
“Is this true?” Tab asked.
Carl’s jaw was set. He stared at the floor, breathing sharply through his nose.
“He said it was his initiation into the Laughing Tigers. A Vietnamese gang.”
“We’re Cambodian. American, now.”
“Yeah, well. He didn’t give us much trouble, said he lived here. I told him as long as you were home, we’d turn him over to you.” The cop unfastened the handcuffs. Carl hurried past Tab into the apartment. “Keep an eye on him,” the cop said. “I won’t be so nice next time.”
“Yes, sir,” Tab said. “Thank you.”
How do you keep hold of your son, your only son, the only family you have left, when you don’t know what he does during the day? When he doesn’t come home until two in the morning on school nights?
You move. Move someplace safe.
The river. Always moving. Giving and taking with indifference.
The canoe washes up again, its stern caught on the protruding roots of an ash tree. The bow bobs in the flowing river.
Again, Carl asks, “Can we keep it?”
Tab looks up and down the river, wondering where it came from. “If no one else claims it.” He pulls it onto the shore so the tug of current won’t reclaim it. “Go inside and grab some rope. We’ll tie it to this tree for now.”
“Let me take it out on the river,” Carl says. A warped paddle lays across the canoe floor. Carl looks up at his father. “Come with me. It’ll be fun.”
“Neither of us knows how to ride this.”
“I do. It’s easy.”
“I don’t think—”
Carl shoves the canoe into the water and straddles the bow. “Forget it,” he says. “I’ll go myself.” He pushes off from shore, carefully steps across the bottom to the stern, sits, picks up the paddle, and straightens the canoe.
“Be careful,” Tab calls.
Carl and the canoe slip easily around a bend in the river and disappear from view.
Tab fashions a flier on yellow paper and carries it to the roadhouse. There is no community center up here, no coffee shop, no VFW. There is only the roadhouse, and if anything needs to be said or learned, this is the place to go.
Tab sits at the bar. “Anybody missing a canoe?” he asks Jim, the bartender.
“Haven’t heard anything.” Jim pours a cup of coffee for Tab, and slides a container of half-and-half across the bar.
“It washed up at our home the other day.” He shows Jim the flier. “May I put this up?” He staples it to a bulletin board by the door on which other fliers announce items for sale, property for rent, dogs and cats lost and found, rides offered out of town to Duluth and the Twin Cities.
Tab comes back to his cup of coffee. Sips it. Carl has already taken the canoe out on the river each of the last two days, and was gone for hours both times. This is good for a boy his age, isn’t it? Out in the forest, in the branch-filtered sun? Good exercise. Fresh air. Better than sitting in his room all day playing video games and watching television. Why is it, then, that Tab feels the familiar pangs of worry in his heart?
“Something wrong?” Jim asks.
“No.” Tab looks up. “Nothing is wrong.”
But what about drugs? Maybe that would explain Carl’s melancholy. Once, Tab found marijuana in his room in New York. But here? Up here where there is clean air and warm sun and a pleasant river flowing nearby?
No. Not here, Tab decides. Carl’s lonely. He’s a young man. He has no girlfriend. That’s all it is.
Three round, pink scars throb like fluttering moths on Tab’s back and shoulder. Three round, pink scars left by bullets all those years ago while crossing the Mekong River. Maybe someday Tab will tell Carl about them. Maybe someday. But it is too hard to talk about now. Too hard to think about. Maybe someday.
River. Slow and steady. Carl gone all day long. What is downriver that interests a teenage boy so much? When he comes home each evening, he is full of sweat and quiet. Goes straight to his room as if he’s got a secret. Three weeks have passed since the canoe showed up. Every day, Carl has taken it out, letting the current ferry him away, only to come back in the evening, paddling hard.
And last night, Carl didn’t come back until past midnight. Tab drove the Volkswagen down a service road adjacent to the river, shining a flashlight through the trees, looking for the talcum red glow of hull in the cone of light, but saw nothing. He stopped at the roadhouse and asked if anyone had seen him. No one had. When Tab drove back to the cabin, there was Carl in bed, snoring heavily. He would wait until morning to scold him.
But come morning, Carl is gone, the rope that kept the canoe tied to the ash tree frayed and loose, floating
