He said something else, but I was no longer paying attention.
I rolled down my window and tossed the cell phone out into the night.
16
THE SNOW WAS FALLING fast by the time the taxi dropped me off at Happy’s gated neighborhood. I didn’t ask the driver to wait. There was no telling how long it would take to convince Happy to give me the letters, but I’d already decided I wasn’t leaving without them. My immediate concern — despite all the others I should have had — was whether I’d chosen the right address.
The security gates were closed. I stood shivering beneath the streetlamp in a chamber of yellow light that felt like the inside of a snow globe. Soon a car approached and I followed it through the gates and into the neighborhood, its tire trail and my footprints the first markings on the fresh snow.
A narrow road led me down a long, winding block of identical one-story duplexes, which were themselves two mirrored halves, each with the same Mediterranean-style roof and pink stucco walls and sometimes the same collection of palm trees and bushes, the only distinguishing feature the color of the front door or the car in the driveway. As I wandered through the falling snow with Happy’s address in my hand, I wondered how long it had taken her to not get lost in this maze of sameness.
I passed some kids playing in the snow without coats or gloves. They slid across small patches of lawn that were still green underneath, shook powder off tree branches that still had leaves. This must have been their first snowfall. I remembered a few flurries that instantly melted on the streets of Oakland thirty years ago, when I was in my teens. It stunned me that my first real snowfall ended up being in the desert, of all places, that forty-five years in the world had only gotten me this far from home.
By the time I found Happy’s house, I couldn’t feel my face or my fingers and had to brush snow out of my hair. Several cars were parked along the curb across the street, covered in a thin layer of snow, none of them familiar. Her side of the street was empty, as was her driveway, her car probably parked in the garage. The blinds on all her windows were closed too, but the lights in one were on. I rechecked the address above the garage. Even as I approached the front door, I kept wondering if I had the wrong half of the duplex.
I knocked and waited, then knocked again. I thought about calling out her name, but all the houses on the block were close together, and even my knocking had sounded too loud.
I tried the knob and it turned and the door opened. I spoke into the doorway, “Happy? Are you there?”
On the wall of the dark entryway, a painting of a young Vietnamese woman in a yellow áo dài smiled at me. She was holding her rice hat against her belly, her long black hair falling over her shoulder. Beside the painting stood a coat rack that held Happy’s black peacoat.
I stepped into the entryway and could see part of the living room around the corner and the illuminated red lampshade that ruddied the shadows.
“Happy?” I called out again, my annoyance growing now that I was sure I had the right place. “It’s Robert. I’m coming in.”
I closed the front door and approached the living room. Turning the corner, I saw lit candles on the kitchen counter, then an ivory couch across the way with something long and black draped over its back. Another coat. Beyond the couch was an unlit hallway that led to four closed doors.
When I stepped onto the cream carpet, my wet shoes stained it, so I bent down to untie my laces, and it was only then that I noticed the darker shoeprints ahead of me.
I pulled out my gun and stepped farther into the living room. To my far left, sitting in an armchair beside an unlit Christmas tree, was Sonny.
His head was reclined on the seatback, his dull eyes narrowed on me. He seemed unsurprised by my presence and uninterested in the gun I had on him. His own he held limply, pointed at the floor. It was like my appearance had just awakened him from a deep nap. Beside him on the end table was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker.
“Set the gun on the floor,” I ordered him and moved behind the couch.
He lifted his head. His face was flushed. Tiredly, he said, “This again, huh?”
He was right, of course. Even the shadows gave me déjà vu. I’d spent the last twenty-four hours wishing I had shot him five months ago, and here I was back in the same spot, made impotent again by fear and curiosity.
“Why are you here?” I said. “Where’s Happy?”
“She not here no more. She gone.”
“Gone where? Why?”
He shook his head as though the questions were too stupid to answer.
“I said drop the gun, Sonny. Did you hurt Happy? Where is she?”
“Where my wife? Where my fucking money? You know that?”
He came to life, wincing as he sat up and plunked his gun on the table and grabbed the pack of cigarettes lying there. He lit up and massaged his scalp with his other hand, then ran it roughly across his face like he was wiping off the exhaustion. His smoking hand, I noticed, was shaking slightly. He was an emotional drunk, unsurprisingly, liable to be at his most violent but also, I was hoping, his most sincere.
“Suzy’s gone,” I said. “She’s left town for good. I don’t know where, but I know she’s not coming back. To me or to you.”
“Suzy,” he muttered and shook his head. “You give her that name?”
“Let’s bury it right here, Sonny. She’s gone, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Go on with your life. Let me go home and go on with mine.”
“That it, huh? We just say bye-bye, huh?”
“You brought me here to find her, but there’s nothing to find.”
“My stupid son — that his idea. He don’t tell me nothing. He say he take care of everything, but he don’t get shit done. Look at you. What you do here now? You point the gun at me like this your house. I pay for this house! My son — it all his fucking idea! Me? I want bring you here and fuck you up, man.”
His voice was rousing his body, his fists tightening with each word. I’d been holding on to some possibility of getting him out of the house so I could search for the letters, but my other con cern now was how to get myself out without one of us getting shot.
The phone beside him rang, startling only me. After the third ring, Sonny lifted the receiver, killed the call, and left the receiver upturned on the end table beside his gun. The dial tone droned between us.
“Who’re you ignoring, Sonny?”
He dumped a couple of cigarettes onto the table for himself, then held out the pack. “Smoke with me.”
When I didn’t move, he flung the pack peevishly at me and it landed on the carpet by my feet. “Smoke a fucking cigarette, huh?”
“Why?”
“We talk. Like man to man. You want go home, right?”
I had only two choices now: shoot him or humor him. I reached down for the pack, keeping my gun trained on his heart, and shook a cigarette out onto my lips. I lit it with the candle on the kitchen counter behind me and took it in like a long drink.
The phone had gone into its echoing off-hook tone like some distant siren. Sonny stole a swill of the Johnnie Walker and winced again. Then he relaxed, and a wry smile appeared on his face.
“Nowadays, man, I love play poker with American. The old day I sit down at the table and they think I don’t know shit. They loud, they laugh, they think they run over me because I small, I talk funny. It don’t matter I have good game or bad game. They always think they better. But now, man, I talk louder, I laugh louder, make bigger joke, especially when I beat them, take all their money. I love when they don’t got nothing to say. It’s like I broke their dream, man. It’s like I take their money and their voice.”