“Why’re you telling me this?”
“You fight in the war? I fight with Americans in the war. They get drunk and piss in the street in front of my mother. They drive around and try to pull the pretty girl on their Jeep and laugh when the girl scream and run away. They wanna fuck all the Vietnamese girl, every one they see. Sometime, they fall in love too. One fucking GI, I remember he tall and so white he look like he sick. Always call us ‘slant-eye’ and ‘Marvin the motherfuckin’ ARVN.’ He make joke we not understand, pat us on our head like we little boy. You know what this guy do? He fall in love with a bar girl, man. He buy her all the gifts and promise he take her home and marry her. He so dumb he don’t know she just want go to America and take his money. So what happen? She find another GI who promise her better thing and she leave this guy. And he so fucking sad, he not talk to nobody for a whole week. Nothing. Then one day, he find the other GI in the street. He not say a word. He just walk up and stick his knife right here.”
Sonny made a single stabbing gesture at his throat.
“So I remind you of him.”
“No, man. You not got the balls to do what he do. You the other GI, the one who die.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Sonny.”
“Shoot me then. I let you.” He picked up his gun by the barrel and tossed it on the couch in front of me. “Shoot me and you can go.” He made a finger gun and pointed it at his temple. “Shoot me!” he hissed through his teeth, his chin raised, his bloodshot eyes flaring at me.
Just as quickly as it erupted, his temper vanished and he took another pull from the bottle.
I reached for his gun and slipped it into my coat pocket. I looked around for something I could tie his hands and feet with, keep him drunk and immobile while I looked for the letters.
“She never talk about you, man,” he said wearily.
“All right, Sonny.”
“No, she not talk about you ever, man. You know why?”
“Shut up, Sonny.”
“She feel sorry for you, man. She hate me, but she feel sorry for you.”
His tone stopped me. His bravado had given way to a hush of seriousness, like he was genuinely sad for me. He put the bottle again to his lips, then changed his mind and let it sink into his lap.
Mai might have been right about him after all. I wanted to despise him wholeheartedly in that moment, but it was dawning on me that he not only loved Suzy, but might have loved her more than I ever did — with a depth, with layers, too many probably, that I’d always hoped for but was never truly capable of. Perhaps you need full reciprocity to feel it like he did. Perhaps you have to be willing to hurt and kill and suffer and die for it.
I dropped my cigarette in a glass of water on the kitchen counter, unsatisfied by the hiss, and I wondered if Suzy had asked Sonny for my life also out of pity. There was, strangely, no real anger or envy in me — just the suspicion that I had lost this fight a long time ago, that actually the fight was never mine to win or lose.
Sonny was peering at the fake fireplace with its fake logs and all the candles and picture frames cluttering Happy’s mantelpiece. I remembered those same pictures from her old place in Oakland and knew how much family she still had in Vietnam, how none of them had ever made it to America though some had tried. Sonny was looking them over like he knew that too.
Then I spotted, atop those fake logs, the crumpled ashy remains of an envelope. I picked up what survived of the letter inside, a tiny scrap of paper with Suzy’s unmistakable handwriting in English, the end of two lines:
never forget.
first time I see
Sonny’s heavy-lidded eyes were still pitying me.
“Why did you do this?” I said. “This was mine.”
“You not deserve it. Don’t worry, it just one page.”
“You read it?”
“You want know what she say? She say she appreciate what you do for her. She say she want remember you like the first day she see you. She say you a good man. She say she admire you.”
“You’re making that shit up.”
“I not lie, man. She lie, though. She want to make you feel better. That what I say, man — she feel sorry for you.”
“Where are the other letters? Where the fuck are the other letters?”
He had another cigarette in his mouth. Absently, as though sighing surrender, he said, “Happy not tell me that.” His hands shook slightly as the lighter lit up his face. That’s when I noticed the bright red scratch marks on his cheek.
“Sonny — where’s Happy?”
He was staring straight ahead, drowsily, as though waiting for sleep to overcome him.
“Sonny. I called here an hour ago. I was just on the phone with her.”
“I hear you all talk.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I hear every word she say to you.” His head rolled back onto the seatback and he closed his eyes.
I backed into the hallway. With my gun still trained on him, I opened the first door and flicked on the light. It was the bathroom. I pulled back the shower curtain but the tub was empty.
The adjacent door revealed a closet full of stacked shoe boxes and casino uniforms hung in dry-cleaning plastic.
I threw open the third door. The darkness receded into the room: bedsheets pulled onto the floor, an overturned lamp, a whiff of shit. Even before I flipped the light switch, I could already make out the outline of her body, her thin forearm extended over the edge of the bed.
She was still wearing her uniform, her bow tie twisted vertically like he had used that to strangle her, though I could see his purple thumb marks on her throat. Her body was warm, but her face was the color of concrete, her eyes hemorrhaged red and gaping at the ceiling. Her tongue stuck out, a dry slug on her bluish lips, like it was plugging her mouth, and in my mind her pained laugh on the phone became the sound of everything she had ever been to me.
I finally noticed the kitchen knife, streaked with blood, lying on the carpet beneath her outstretched hand. I reached down for it, and it was then that I stepped on her glasses. They crunched beneath my feet.
Sonny had not moved in his chair, his eyes open but looking at nothing. I finally saw the dark wet blotch on his outer thigh, staining the inside of the yellow chair brown.
“I not want to do it,” he murmured and brought his cigarette to his lips.
I slapped it out of his hand. He tried to speak but I swatted his face with the butt of my gun and he fell out of the chair and onto the carpet. He gasped and grabbed his thigh and I stomped on him twice there, on his hand and his wound, and when he screamed out I went down on one knee and slugged him, pummeling his skull, his face, my knuckles scraping his teeth. My hand recoiled and I had to catch my breath, and all my rage went to the pain in my torn hand.
I shoved the gun’s muzzle against his temple. His face was half hidden in the crook of an arm, blood dripping from his mouth and onto his chin, crawling down his cheek from the gash above his eye.
It wasn’t fear or hesitation that kept me from pulling the trigger this time. Just an animal need to hurt him much more while he was still alive to feel it.
“You motherfucker!” I hissed, still on my knees.
Then I saw the phone cord. I thrust my gun into my coat pocket and ripped the cord out of the phone. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.
But I felt his hand seize my leg, and then something hard clunked me on the side of the face. Everything erupted into a black, throbbing vacuum of silence. I came out of it lying on the floor and struggling to open my eyes and finally seeing a bright flare. In my hazy vision, the Christmas tree sprouted a fiery arm, and out of that nightmare came Sonny’s shadowy half-form, crawling toward me and raising his arm one last time to bring the bottle down on my head.