Angela Sloan (10 page)

“You don't know what
keyhole
somebody mean? Chop somebody with cleaver knife so she will die?” She made a slashing gesture.

In the mirror I studied her hard, dark eyes. I got what she was saying now, and I got something else, too. She wasn't simpleminded.

I
interrogated her as follows.

ME:
Why did Wang's mother want to kill you?

CHINESE:
Because I have chop Wang finger.

ME:
Why have you chopped Wang's finger?

CHINESE:
I have chop vegetable. [She pronounced the word with its full four syllables:
vedge uh tuh bow.
] He have grope and fondle.

ME:
Fondling you?

CHINESE:
Yes!

ME:
You like Wang?

CHINESE:
Like?

ME:
[I made a two-handed signal.] You and Wang.

CHINESE:
No! Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Wang? [She said a hundred words in her own language.]

ME:
So when he groped you, you chopped his finger off?

CHINESE:
No, I ignore and keep on chop.

ME:
You're saying it was an accident, then.

CHINESE:
Accident. Mother come in, Wang jump, I am chop his finger!

ME:
Okay. Very good! Now the police will be after you and me both.

CHINESE:
Nope. No police. Mother will
keyhole
!

ME:
Where do you want me to drop you?

CHINESE:
Drop me?

ME:
Have you got some family in town?

CHINESE:
In Taiwan.

ME:
Got your passport?

CHINESE:
Wang have passport.

ME:
In that case you have no choice but to go back to Wang. You can't do anything without your passport.

CHINESE:
Where is you father?

ME:
What do you know about my father?

CHINESE:
Maybe you father need ID like me.

ME:
Get out of my car. No. Don't get out. Why did you say that?

CHINESE:
Maybe, I think Wang have make false ID for you.

ME:
What do you mean, maybe you think?

CHINESE:
I have see these ID card. You are too small to drive. How old?

ME:
Nineteen.

CHINESE:
I think fourteen, maybe less. You have too small chin. That will still grow some more. You have little neck. Mm. Tell me, where is you father?

ME:
My father got those ID cards as a joke, that's all. A practical joke.

CHINESE:
What is “practical joke”?

ME:
That's a gag you pull around the office. Little tricks you play on your friends.

CHINESE:
Trick you friends, good idea. Why will you need false card too?

ME:
I'm part of the joke.

CHINESE:
Where are you going to right now?

ME:
Philadelphia. Look here. I will give you fifty dollars if you will get out of my car and don't tell a soul that you've seen me.

CHINESE:
Fifty? Your father has paid four hundred dollar to play some funny joke on his friends.

ME:
I will give you fifty.

She gave a small, quick nod. I pulled a bill from the brown envelope.

ME:
Have you got change for a hundred?

CHINESE:
No.

ME:
I will give you one hundred, then. You are a cunning Chinese, aren't you? Now you've got to forget everything we've talked about.

CHINESE:
It never make sense anyway.

I looked her over good. She had on plain black slacks, the black cloth slippers with red rubber soles, and a white double-knit top with long points on the collar. There was a grease spot on the blouse, below her ribs. I have already mentioned that her coarse black hair was in two tight braids.

ME:
Goodbye.

CHINESE:
Only, I think you should drop me in Philadelphia.

ME:
Are you serious?

CHINESE:
Mm.

ME:
What are you going to do in Philadelphia?

CHINESE:
You don't have to think about it.

ME:
I'm not a taxi service. You've got money—you can take the train to Philadelphia. Or New York. They've got a great big Chinatown full of your people.

CHINESE:
Can't go to Chinatown. Wang will find me there, somebody will send me back to Baltimore, and Wang mother will have me keyhole or break leg, chop off finger, something. Maybe your funny father need a housekeeper.

ME:
He won't like your references.

I
drove out the north edge of Baltimore into Harford County, spinning a new cover story as I went. To rule out any notion that Ray might take her in on charity, as the Wangs had done, I described a prisonlike boarding school to which I must return this very afternoon. The girl bunking over me had a strong odor. I hardly knew what I would say until I heard myself say it. It is exactly how one should never build a cover.

The Chinese asked me to describe the girl's smell further.

“Like Comet,” I said. “She has purple bags under both eyes, too.”

“What is Comet?”

“A powder for cleaning sinks.”

The Chinese considered. “She might have some parasite. Could be anything.”

I laid on some business about what a miserable life it was, shut up in a dormitory with all the other odd girls, mostly petty thieves, who'd been sent away from their homes.

“You should not complain. Father spend all that money to have you educate.”

“School's for suckers,” I blathered.

“You are a bad daughter.”

It stung me! That's a queer side effect of putting some energy into your lie.

We had come some miles out of the city when the Chinese blurted, “Stop car.” She got out and walked toward some trees, then doubled over, carsick. She came back and knelt at the window. I asked her was she done.

“Done throw up,” she said.

I passed her a box of Chiclets. She stared at a blue one on her wrinkled palm until I told her to put it in her mouth.

She did so, then tipped her head to one side, like a highly intelligent dog will do. She chewed the blue Chiclet twice, then spun away to spit it where the beer and Sprite cans, potato chip bags, and other trash lay along the greasy, gravelly edge of the road. She stood awhile with her shoulders curved, fingertips pressed to the top of her nose. Then she got back into the Scamp.

“Take me someplace that have cigarette,” she said.

That was easy. From the glove compartment I gave her a nearly full pack of Raleighs with a matchbook tucked down under the cellophane. To light the match she held it stationary and struck the book against it, instead of the reverse, as every other person I have ever seen strike a match has done.

“I will stay here,” she said. She got out of the car.

Was it that easy? I wished I had thought to ply her with cigarettes earlier. “I don't mind driving you to a bus station,” I said.

She wagged her thumb.

“Fine,” I said. Hitchhiking is risky for most girls, but in light of Wang's finger I was more concerned for whoever picked her up.

I tossed the pack of Raleighs out the window to her. It flipped through the air until she clapped her small, neat hands together on it.

I left her standing in the high grass beside the road.

I
t was a relief to have the scowling Asian out of my Scamp. I crossed a bridge over a reservoir, and she was history. With no passport her prospects were bad, but there is a saying,
No es mi problema.
Anyway I'd left her a hundred smackers ahead.

For some reason I turned to look at the back seat, where she'd been. There on the white vinyl was Benjamin Franklin, about to slide down the crack. The sly Chinese had left my gift behind. Was this some special Far Eastern brand of insult? Or was it a way to free her conscience?

Well, I didn't want her conscience freed. I had bought that Chinese waitress, and I meant for her to stay bought. But when I got back over the bridge to the spot where I had left her, she was gone. No traffic had passed, so I took the hundred with me down a wide trail into the woods, calling, “Hey! Chinese girl!”

I emerged at the edge of the reservoir. On the narrow gray beach, on the moss of a fallen tree trunk, I found Ray's pack of Raleighs.

I looked all around me for a long time. No Chinese girl. But then I did see her, or only her head, ten yards out in the water with the sun on it, one hand up with a cigarette between the fingers.

“What in the heck are you doing out there?”

“Smoke cigarette! Go away!”

“Go away? This is weird! Where are your clothes?”

“I have them.”

“You have them?”

She put the cigarette in her mouth, and I saw her shirt cuff. She was wearing her shirt.

“This is a new extreme of modesty,” I said. “You are bathing alone in a deserted lake in the woods in all of your clothes.” I looked again and saw the marks of her rubber-soled slippers leading into the water. What about that? She had her shoes on, too.

“Why have you come here? Go.”

“I came to bring you this money back.” I shook the bill.

“Don't want it!”

“You will need it,” I said. “Also, you do want it. You bargained with me for it.”

After a silent half minute she said, “Leave it on the tree.”

“When I bribe somebody, I mean for her to stay bribed!”

“Leave on tree!”

“It will blow away.”

“Put a rock on top!”

“I am not leaving this one-hundred-dollar bill on a tree trunk with a rock on it. Suppose you were to drown out there! Can you swim, Chinese? What are you doing, standing on the bottom of the lake? I never heard of somebody smoking a cigarette while swimming. Is that how you do it in Taiwan?”

The head came closer. That was creepy to see. She had taken her braids out, and the wet hair clung to her neck like seaweed. She rose toward the shore in
Creature from the Black Lagoon
fashion, dark water streaming. The heavy pants pulled at her hips. She pinched the cigarette in her mouth and scooped handfuls of gray sand from both her pants pockets.

“Why do you have sand in your pockets?”

She only scowled at me and wouldn't answer.

“Turn them inside out,” I suggested.

But the pockets weren't lined, so they couldn't be turned inside out. She kept scooping.

“You are an odd thing,” I said.

“Always go swim with sand in my pockets. Make the lungs work.”

“Now your clothes are soaking wet and your pockets have sand in them, nut job.”

Something burst out of her mouth. I first thought it was a sneeze, but no, it was her language. She went off on a long, mad tear of mush-like syllables, knee-deep in the murky reservoir. She turned her back and worked her arms. Heaven knows what she was saying. It might have been classical Confucian mottoes, or there again, it might have been a Chinese form of gibberish. It seems natural to me that a Chinese person's gibberish
would also sound Chinese, just like Tintin's dog when he barks sounds Belgian. “
Wooah wooah!
”

When the thing was done being said, whatever it was, she waded up to the beach and snatched the hundred from my grip. She pushed the stiff bill into her wet, sandy pants pocket. “Now can go shopping!”

“Excuse me. What have I done?”

She glowered. For her it wasn't enough to be an obstacle impeding my progress: she had to be unpleasant as well.

T
hat morning at Sears and Roebuck I had bought myself a patchwork print dress in yellow, red, and brown with a short skirt, puffy sleeves, and a green collar. I allowed the Chinese girl to put it on. It fit her all right. She was only a little taller than I and somewhat fuller through the hips. She wouldn't tell her age.

I drove west. “I bet you are hungry,” I said. “Swimming always makes me hungry.” I found the highway and stopped at a Stuckey's. She didn't know what to order, so I got us two BLTs. She took hers apart and devoured the bacon first. Then she ate the pickle spear and a parsley sprig that probably had not been washed, since it was a garnish and not meant to be eaten. Then she ate the lettuce, after using a butter knife to scrape the mayonnaise off.

The tabletop was made of white Formica with glitter in it and a dull band of aluminum around the edge. The Chinese girl rubbed her finger on the Formica as though trying to determine how the glitter was stuck on. She handled everything: the bottle of ketchup with its grimy white cap, the chrome napkin dispenser, the stamped-metal ashtray, and the bowl made of lacquered wood chips that held the sugar packets.

“Anyway, what is your name?” I said.

“Baydee.”

“Baydee?”

“
Baydee.
Like
Baydee Graybo.
”

“Betty?”

“Yeah.
Baydee.
”

She knocked a blob of ketchup onto her plate and dipped the edge of a tomato slice in it. Her bites were small and cautious, but she chewed fast.

A woman followed me into the ladies' room and asked where I was from.

“I only meant it making conversation,” she said when I didn't answer. “Fran and I left Augusta at daylight, and I'm so bored I could scream!” Fran was her husband. He made a habit of driving under the speed limit because he believed it to be easier on the vehicle. “But it is harder on the wife,” she said. “I would rather put the wear on the Oldsmobile than spend one extra minute shut inside it not allowed to remark on things I notice.” She asked where my parents were.