Trouble (28 page)

"We'll cross over at night," said Chay.

"So why don't we eat now?" said Sanborn—which they did. They stopped by the shore and Henry pumped Franklin's Coleman stove while Chay opened three cans of beef stew. Henry heated them, and they ate ravenously. Then Henry cleaned out one of the cans and took some water from the lake. He boiled it, and then cooked up a mix of French cut beans and dried onions, and they ate that, too. And then Sanborn took out a fry pan and emptied a plastic bag of asparagus spears into it—and then a tin of sardines on a whim—and it all smelled so wonderful that they ate with their fingers right out of the fry pan.

Black Dog got her share as well—not of the asparagus, which she smelled but wouldn't touch, but of the sardines, which she ate whole.

As they sat eating Fig Newtons, the sun going down beyond the mountain, Henry figured that it had been, all in all, one of the best meals he had ever eaten.

They cleaned the fry pan in the lake, crushed the cans and stored them, and tied up the packs again—there wasn't any food left over from the meal to save—and in the darkness thrown off by Katahdin, they headed out. Behind the mountain, the sky was a deep red, though the peak was still fully lit and yellow. They watched the sky grow darker and darker as they came down to the road, waited until they could see no headlights in either direction, and then climbed onto the asphalt—which seemed remarkably hard on their feet after an afternoon of walking on pine needles—and crossed the low bridge over the lake, seeing in its waters the last light of the dying day. Ahead of them, the peak of Katahdin was still lit.

On the far side of the bridge, they turned back west and walked alongside a stand of old hardwoods as the light fled utterly and the mountain slowly disappeared into the night. When they could tell Katahdin was there only because it blocked out the stars behind it, they stopped. They found some low dead limbs to hack from the trunks and downed wood that wasn't too damp and gathered it into a loose woodpile. Chay put the fire together while Sanborn and Henry spread the tarp, opened their sleeping bags, hung their packs on some stout branches, and took out sweatshirts and another of Franklin's rugby shirts for Chay. Even with a fire, you should still wear an extra shirt when you camp out, Franklin had said. Henry could almost see Franklin's hands on his own as he unpacked.

The first spark of flame in a campfire is a sign of hope, but that wasn't what Henry was thinking about as Chay knelt low to the ground and blew on the reddening edge of the birch bark. The bark glowed more sharply with each of Chay's breaths, until suddenly it caught hold in a pale yellow flame, and then the twigs leaned into it and started crackling, and the tiny flame illuminated the column of smoke coming up. The flames lit Chay's hands and face as he added thin sticks and blew at the bottom of the pile. And it wasn't long before the crackling was constant and Chay was adding thicker wood, and all the light that the sun had put into these branches came blazing back at them. They settled around it, watching the fire turn red and white and blue.

They were quiet, listening to the crackles. Henry felt the presence of the mountain behind him, so large that it could block out wheeling stars. And he wondered how it was that he felt like nothing so much as crying in a world that seemed so beautiful, and yet had so much Trouble. Tomorrow he would finally be at the mountain. Suppose, when he reached it, he found nothing at all?

And what was he expecting to find there, anyway?

Chay added a long piece of wood to the fire. Sparks flew up a few feet, and then died. "The mountain is bigger than I thought," he said.

Quiet. Henry looked into the darkness.

"Maybe there was a time when people who lived here thought it was sacred, a place to go when there was trouble." Chay almost whispered.

"I think it was like that, once," said Henry.

"It's where I would go, if I was in trouble," said Chay. He looked behind him. "I'd go and wait there. Something would happen. Someone would come." He added another piece to the fire and it flared up. "Probably Mike," he said.

"Yeah," said Sanborn. "Because he'd have another pile of wood to stack."

Chay didn't say anything. He found a branch on the ground and peeled off its bark. Then he threw it all into the fire.

Behind them, the mountain loomed.

"Tell us about the refugee camps," Henry said.

Chay looked at him.

"What do you remember?"

Chay sat down close to the flames. "Hunger," he said. "I remember hunger. Eating grass. My mother making me eat fish that stank. I remember a soldier taking me when my mother was gone and making me crawl on my hands and knees through a field, and my mother coming after me because he was making me check for land mines. She ran through the field to pick me up. That was the night we left the camp. I remember walking. There were red flowers on the trees. We got to the sea and found a boat with other refugees. Everyone was screaming to get on the boat."

Chay crossed his legs and spread his arms out over them. He stayed that way a long time. A cold breeze blew down on them from the shadow of Katahdin, and Henry moved closer to the fire.

"So did you get on the boat?" Sanborn asked.

Chay nodded. "Yes," he said.

And suddenly it was all there in Henry's mind, refugees on the shore, leaving everything—like pilgrims setting out to seek strange places that they didn't know much about. Or worse, like the imprisoned Indians below the decks of the
Seaflower.
A crowd of people scared. All desperate. All afraid.

Trouble.

Chay told them as if the story had been writhing inside him like a dark tiger, and he was finally going to release it in the shadow of Katahdin. How they had forced themselves onto the boat. How the boat had left the dock with families split in half, and how some of them swam out until they sank into the water. The ocean red. There was no food onboard, no water, and the engines sputtered and belched smoke and sometimes stopped altogether, and they drifted in the heat and stink of three hundred people crammed together. Some jumped over the side. Some were pushed over the side.

"We saw a lot of other ships," said Chay, "and we signaled to them." But none of the ships answered, and when the engines finally coughed themselves to death, they drifted with the wind and his mother was crying. Finally, a fishing boat saw them. They tied up, and then they came aboard with guns and axes. They'd take what they wanted in payment for a tow, they said, and the refugees gave them rings, clothing, necklaces, and then the fishermen boarded their own boat again and cut loose, sending bullets and laughter back at them.

So they drifted, and drifted, and drifted, and if it had not been for a Danish ship that found them and towed them to Hong Kong, they would have drifted until they capsized and drowned, and been glad of it.

But the Chouans were lucky. They weren't stuck forever in Hong Kong. They were put on a ship to Guam, and then on another ship to San Francisco, America, and they lived in a Presbyterian church basement for four months. They could smell freedom. Then they took a bus all the way to Merton, Massachusetts, and the first morning that Chay woke up there—in another church basement—it had snowed. He had never seen anything like it before. He took his little brother outside, and they let it melt on their faces. And when they breathed, they could see their breath! Like dragons! Only cold.

"From then to now, there was one rule," said Chay. "Remember you were Cambodian before you were American."

"So what does that mean?" said Sanborn.

"It means you speak Cambodian at home. You go to Cambodian markets and not A&P. You honor your ancestors and the Buddha. You send what you can back to those still in Cambodia."

"And you don't fall in love with American girls," said Henry.

Chay said nothing.

"Which is why your father was angry."

Nothing.

"Because of Louisa," whispered Henry.

Chay looked at Henry, and was as still as the mountain behind them.

"Louisa?" said Sanborn.

The fire cracked loudly, and more sparks shot into the air and died.

Back on the road, a car's headlights came along quickly, and then slowed. The car went on, then turned and came back, sweeping its beams in their direction. It stopped and its lights went out. Two doors opened and closed. In the darkness, Henry couldn't tell if anyone was coming toward them or not. He couldn't see anything—but he figured that it wouldn't be hard for whoever got out of the car to see them sitting by the fire.

"It's probably the guy who owns this field," said Sanborn. "Maybe he thinks we're trespassing or something."

"We
are
trespassing," said Henry.

"Isn't this some sort of state park? We're camping out. That's not the same as trespassing."

"What's the difference?"

"It's got something to do with malicious intent."

"I think it has to do with being on someone else's property, Sanborn."

Whatever it was, they looked out into the darkness over the field for the Trouble that was coming toward them. Chay did not move at all—until Black Dog suddenly perked up her ears.

Henry reached up to put his hand on her collar—as two men came into the firelight and stood beside the pile of wood they had gathered.

One of them held a shotgun over his forearm.

The other held a broken glass root beer bottle. An Admiral Ames.

The two fishermen from the Chowder Mug.

"Hello, hello," the one with the shotgun said cheerfully. "We weren't sure if we'd find you or not."

C
HAY DID NOT MOVE,
but Henry, Sanborn, and Black Dog stood up. Henry couldn't take his eyes from the reflection of the red firelight flickering on the long barrel of the shotgun. He held Black Dog's collar tightly.

"Good thing you said where you were going," said the one with the shotgun.

"And good thing there's only one road here," said the one with the Admiral Ames bottle: Mack.

"I guess that would make it easier for someone low on the Darwinian scale," said Sanborn.

Henry thought that might not have been the best thing to say.

The man with the bottle swung it slowly toward him. "So smart," he said. "I sure do wish I was as smart as you, kid. But when I was your age, I was heading over to Vietnam to fight for my country against him." He pointed at Chay.

"No, you weren't," said Sanborn.

"Sanborn," said Henry quietly. He thought that Sanborn might not understand that they were in trouble here and he wasn't helping.

"Yeah,
Sanborn,
" said Mack. "Why don't you shut up? We're not here for you."

"What do you want?" said Henry.

Mack held the bottle out so that its jagged and splintered shards caught the firelight. "To return this." He turned to Chay. "You dropped it in the parking lot. We think you were going to use it on us, because that's the kind of sneaky trick that a VC pulls. So we thought we'd bring it back to you and see how you like it yourself. ... So how do you like it, gook?"

At the word, Chay stood, too.

"Oh, you don't like it. Or is being called a gook what you don't like? Is that it, gook? Because that's what you are. A gook." The man took a step in and held the broken bottle toward Chay. "So what are you going to do about it, gook?"

"We're not asking for trouble," said Henry.

"We weren't, either," said the man with the shotgun. "And then a few of them started coming. And no one cared—until they started taking our jobs. You know how many years my family fished out of Gloucester? You know how many?" He jerked the shotgun at Chay. "And then
he
comes and I'm laid off my boat, and Mack here, too, and they hire ..." He pointed with his chin at Chay. "It's time we handled things ourselves," he said.

"He's not a fisherman," said Henry.

"Then we won't cut him up as bad as we did the others," said Mack.

"He's not even from Vietnam."

"How do you know?" said Mack. "Were you squatting in a stinking rice paddy watching guys like him shooting at you? Were you there? Did you have a buddy scream for you because he's shot in the belly and you can't get to him because the VC are using him as bait?" He drew up the sleeve of his left arm. Even in the quivering light of the fire, Henry could see the round scars pocked up in a line from wrist to elbow. "Did you ever get shot up?"

Chay took a step closer. The man with the shotgun leveled it at his chest.

"The war was in Cambodia, too," Chay said. "Only in Cambodia, it didn't matter which side you were on. They all wanted you dead." He nodded at the two men. "They were like you."

Except for the crackling of the fire, everything was silent beneath Katahdin. Not even the wind rustled her long tresses. Black Dog whined once, and was still.

Chay reached up and drew off Franklin's rugby shirt, and Henry saw for the first time the long welts that lay across his back. New welts. In the firelight, they blazed red.

Even in the middle of Trouble, Henry wondered where they came from. Because of Louisa? Because Chay could dare to love—and be loved by—an American girl?

Chay threw the shirt to Henry. "Henry, Sanborn," he said, "go. Go far away."

Henry looked at the two men, holding their bottle and shotgun toward Chay.

If you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you, Henry's father had said.

He was wrong, Henry thought.

You have to live where Trouble is.

He bent down to pick up Franklin's shirt, which had fallen by the fire. He let go of Black Dog's collar. He reached for one of the branches, a thick one, burning at one end. He stood. He drew his arm back.

"Hey," said Mack.

All that took about half a second.

In the next half second, Chay turned and saw what Henry was doing.

Black Dog leaped in front of Chay.

Sanborn reached down to the fire for another burning branch.

And with a cry that sounded like something out of Savage Cove, Henry threw his branch, end over end, at Mack, who held up his pocked arm but missed the branch as it hurtled into his chest and face, sparks flying all around him.