Fake House (17 page)

It was a miracle I didn’t drown. Or maybe I did drown: When I came to, I was sprawled on the sand, facedown,
with my shorts lying near my right ear
. The sun was rising. Good thing I wasn’t arrested.

What had set me off was the bartender saying, “That girl swims every night. She don’t mind and we don’t mind.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Skinny-dip.” He laughed. “Skinny-dipping?!”

“Sure!”

“No clothes?”

The bartender gave me a look of contempt, as if I was too stupid to understand my own language. “Yes, yes, no clothes!”

I remember becoming infuriated. For a moment I thought I was going to slam my Tiger beer against the side of his face. As if on cue, all the other men sitting at the bar, all Vietnamese, started laughing. Why were they laughing?

But of course I knew why they were laughing. As I walked across the burning sand, I glanced down at her freckled cleavage and thought,
Past is past tense, adjectives before nouns
. She opened her green eyes and grinned.
Maybe I should step on your belly
, I thought.
So you won! So what?
As my wife’s shrill voice pricked my sunburned back, I strode defiantly into the warm water and started swimming east.

W
ESTERN
M
USIC

O
utside the glass door of Fish and Chick, the white noise of the motorcycle traffic sputtered:
putt, putt, putt, putt
. Inside, Skinny and Dercum sat at the bar, their sweat cooled by the air-conditioning. Kurt Cobain was screaming on the stereo. It was the beginning of summer, just before the monsoon season. Skinny was drunk on Jägermeister. He shouted, “I’m sick of this place!”

“So am I!” Dercum said.

“I’ve got to get out of here.”

“We can go have a beer at M.I.G. or Bar Nixon if you like.”

“No! No! No! No! What I mean is, I’m sick of Hanoi!”

“Do you want to go back to New York?”

“I don’t want to go home. I just need to get away from Hanoi.”

“We can go to Sapa.”

“No, not Sapa.” Skinny took a drag on his Perfume River cigarette. He jabbed his face over his shoulder toward the Israelis,
Dutch, Germans, Aussies, and Frenchmen sitting at tables behind them. “I’m tired of looking at these Eurotrash!”

“I’ll talk to Mai tomorrow.”

For five dollars a day, Mr. Mai waited every day for Dercum outside the Victory Hotel to take him where he wanted to go. He was Dercum’s personal cyclo driver. Wiry, with a bronze complexion, he was in his midfifties, a grandfather. He was too well dressed for his profession. In public he wore a tailored shirt, tie, polyester slacks, and imitation leather wingtips. Unlike most men his age, he was not a veteran. He was not allowed to serve, because his parents were branded reactionaries by the Viet Minh, who executed his father in 1955 during the Land Reform Program. His mother committed suicide soon afterward.

Dercum walked out of the hotel lobby and found him, as usual, lounging in his cab beneath the flame tree.
“Chao Ong!”

Mr. Mai roused himself from his seat: “How are you doing this morning, Dirt? Where we going?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe nowhere.”

“Nowhere very good. I sit here and drink beer.” Mr. Mai eased back down, lifted a plastic cup of beer to his lips. His eyes were bloodshot.

Dercum lit a Marlboro. “My friend is getting sick of Hanoi.”

“Skin Knee sick of Hanoi?”

“Yes, Skinny is very sick of this place.”

“Tell him to go home.”

“But he does not want to go home yet.”

“Tell him to go to Hanoi Hilton.”

“Now, now, let’s not get personal. Skinny is sick of looking at the Eu-ro-trash.”

“Year-old trash?”

“Eu-ro-trash. Like White Trash.” Dercum smiled good-naturedly. “Like me, but Eu-ro-pean.”

Mr. Mai finished his beer, burped, crossed his leg.

Dercum continued: “We want to go the countryside, somewhere where there’s no Europeans or Americans.”

Mr. Mai jiggled his empty cup. “For how long, Boss?”

“A week.”

“To do what?”

“Do nothing. We just want to relax in the countryside.”

Mr. Mai jiggled his cup, thought for a moment, then said, “We can go to my wife’s home village.”

“Where’s that?”

“Three hundred kilometers from Hanoi.”

“Nine hours by car?”

“Ten.”

“Which direction?”

“West.”

“In the mountains?”

“Yes.”

“Near Son La?”

“Between Son La and Yen Chau.”

“Is there a hotel there?”

“Hotel?!”

Dercum called Skinny at the Metropole. “It’s all arranged. We’re going to the sticks for a week.”

“Sounds excellent.”

“You should bring along cans of Spam as a precaution.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve eaten ox penises and dogs.”

“You have?”

“And sparrows.”

“What else have you eaten?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“And we should bring along seven cases of beer. A case for each day.”

“I’m really looking forward to this.”

“I’ll bring the toilet paper.”

Dercum Sanders and Skinny, whose real name was Dave Levy, had met at Columbia. Dercum never finished college but dropped out after his sophomore year. First he worked as a bike messenger, then as a sous-chef at Coûte Que Coûte in Midtown, then as a luggage handler for United Airlines, which allowed him to travel to Asia for free, and then his grandmother died. Before Dercum left New York, he said he was going to Vietnam to teach English, but after his first week in Hanoi, he thought,
Why should I feel apologetic about not working? Why shouldn’t I just hang out?
After six months in Vietnam he sent a fax to Skinny:
“You must come over soon. This place is wild. COMPLETE FREEDOM. One feels uninhibited here. I feel like a new man. I am a new man. I cannot wait to see your face again. I think about you day and night. I mean it. In New York nothing is possible. Now I see my past in a new light. You must come over.”

It took Mr. Mai three days to make arrangements for the trip. Dercum and Skinny would split the cost of hiring a four-wheel drive, at six hundred dollars a week, gas and driver included. The party would be composed of Dercum, Skinny, the driver, and Mr. Mai.

To avoid traffic, they decided to leave first thing in the morning. The car showed up promptly at 5
A.M.
in front of the Victory Hotel. It was a Jeep Cherokee. They started loading. Dercum said to Mr. Mai, “All this beer is for you.”

Mr. Mai stared at the cases of Heineken filling the luggage compartment and shook his head convulsively, “Not enough!”

“Not enough?!” Dercum shouted with feigned astonishment. Everyone laughed except the driver, a burly, bearded man in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt with “Mountain Everest Is The Highest Mountain In The World” on the front and “Solo Fucker” on the back.

“You want a beer now?” Dercum asked Mr. Mai.

“Sure.” Dercum handed him a beer. “And one for the driver.”

Dercum handed a beer to the driver.

“Thank you, mate!” the driver said.

“Mr. Mai, please tell him that we’re not Australians.”

“They’re not Australians.”

“I’m Dercum.” Dercum shook the driver’s hand.

Mr. Mai interjected, “Dirt!”

“It’s actually ‘Dirk.’ ”

“Dirt,” the driver said.

“And this is Skinny.”

“Skin Knee.”

“What is your name?”

“Long.” On closer inspection, Long appeared to be only about thirty, although his beard and scowl had made him seem much older.

“Long?”

“Long.”

Skinny looked at Dercum with a twinkle in his eyes. “How long?” he blurted. Dercum burst out laughing. Long stared at Mr. Mai, his face blank.

“Never mind,” Dercum said.

“I think I want a beer also,” Skinny said.

“I didn’t know you drink beer at five in the morning,” Dercum said as he handed Skinny a Heineken.

“Skin Knee is becoming Vietnamese,” Mr. Mai exclaimed.

Dercum and Skinny sat in the back. Mr. Mai sat up front. All except Long were elated as the car started moving. At that hour the streets were filled with people of all ages: walking, jogging, doing tai chi, kicking a soccer ball or a shuttlecock, or playing badminton. They passed a squadron of legless men rolling briskly down Le Hong Phong Street on wheelchairs. “Old V.C.,” Mr. Mai said. Long tapped a morselike staccato on his horn. On the tape deck was Louis Armstrong singing Fats Waller:
“What did I do … to be so black and blue?”

“Do you like Louis Armstrong, Mr. Mai?” Dercum asked.

Mr. Mai didn’t answer him. He was suddenly withdrawn, reflective, charmed by the sights of his home city. Each scene was made novel from the vantage point of a speeding car.

“I like jazz and blues,” Long said.

Most of the motor traffic they encountered was going the other way: people coming into the city from outlying villages. Within twenty minutes, the houses thinned out on both sides. Long tapped on his horn constantly, passing motorcycles, bicycles, trucks, buses, and cars while dodging chickens, pigs, cows, dogs, men, and buffalo. After three hours the road turned to gravel. Mr. Mai rolled the window down four times to throw up his three cans of beer.

Long said, “Easy, Grandfather.”

Mr. Mai moaned, “I’m not used to sitting in a car.”

Dercum said, “We should stop for lunch soon, Long.”

Long turned his head around. “Good place to eat: twenty minutes.” The car ran over a dog. Long could see a rapidly diminishing black shape twitching in the rearview mirror.

“Sounds good.”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Boys! I think we just ran over a dog!” Skinny yelped. “Did we just run over a dog, Long?” Dercum asked.

“No.”

“Can I have another beer?” Mr. Mai said.

Long drove the Cherokee onto the side of the road. The little eatery was fronted by a pool table beneath a fiberglass awning propped up by bamboo poles. They walked past a glass cabinet displaying imported liquors and cigarettes, stepped over a dozing yellow dog, and entered a bright, airy room. On its lime-colored walls were posters of busty white women hugging enormous beer bottles. Up high in one corner was a shelf-altar: In front of a framed, retouched black-and-white photograph of a handsome, smooth-faced, doe-eyed cadet was a sand-filled teacup holding joss sticks, a plate of mandarin oranges, and a plate of boiled chicken. At the back of the room a very old woman sat, all bunched up and immobile, on a bamboo settee in front of a very large, very loud TV, watching a soap opera. They sat down on little plastic stools at a low table. They were the only patrons. The waitress came out of the kitchen and said, “Today we have fried catfish and wild boar.”

Mai ordered: “Bring those dishes, Sister. And fried tofu; boiled watercress; two bowls of soup.”

“What nationality are these people, Uncle?”

“American.”

“They look like Russians.”

“They’re gay.”

“Gay!”

“Hurry up, Sister, we are all starving to death!”

The waitress went back to the kitchen.

“What did you tell her?” Skinny asked Mai.

“She said you look Russian. I said you are Americans.”

Dercum asked, “Where are we?”

“Thao Nguyen.”

Long said to Mai, “Are they really gay?”

“Of course!”

A gaggle of giggling children stood outside the restaurant to stare at Skinny and Dercum. Skinny smiled at them and said, “Boo!” The bravest of the children separated himself from the group and, with goading from the rest, shouted in English, “I love you!” before running away. The rest of them scattered, screaming, “I love you! I love you!”

Everyone but Skinny sat at the table picking their teeth with toothpicks after the meal. The waitress wiped the table cursorily with a rag, sweeping the little fish bones onto the tiled floor. She was wearing a lurid pink shirt with little black dots and red flowers. On her hair was a bright yellow bow. Long said to her, “Sister, do you want to go to the mountain with us?”

“There is nothing but ghosts and savages in those mountains!” She smiled and walked back to the kitchen.

In college Skinny and Dercum were not lovers. Each refused to acknowledge the unbearable fact of his attraction to the other by frantically trying to become a heterosexual. They dated many women, overlapping on occasions. (Skinny would sometimes think, as he was making love to a woman,
His penis has been in there too.)
But they remained emotional intimates, returning to each other for comfort after each failed relationship. When Dercum left for Vietnam, Skinny had just come out. Dercum was still undecided. Their love was consummated
in Skinny’s suite at the Metropole Hotel a day after his arrival.

The car climbed steadily. The road was mostly bad, alternating between asphalt, dirt, and gravel. They passed tea plantations, a litchi forest, fields of maize and fields of tobacco. They drove through Viet towns of wooden and whitewashed brick houses; Black Thai
bans
of houses on stilts, with cows and buffalo beneath them; a Kha Mu village of thatch-roofed huts with walls of woven bark. In every Viet town there was at least one café with a sign outside advertising “karaoke.” They saw a group of Flower Hmongs. One of the men carried a flintlock rifle. The women had woven horsehair into their own hair, creating enormous turbans. Neither Skinny nor Dercum said anything for a long time. Long glanced at the rearview mirror: The two men were asleep leaning against each other.