Her father worked for the Vichy government in Vietnam during World War II. Her mother was Japanese, part of the occupation of French Indochina. They had to keep their love a secret. Her father pulled strings to get her into the best schools. She eventually trained at a university to be an architect. She loved art history, made it her minor, with a special focus on painting. Her father was killed by communist insurgents who wanted to run the French off the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Then America decided to wage war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the centerpiece of its global campaign against communism. Her mother was killed in the early sixties; collateral damage. War, she feared, was all she’d ever know. There had to be beauty in the world, she figured, because she’d seen it in art, in paintings. She grew up in hell, but survived. It was a skill, she explained, like sailing or carpentry. As the war was ending she volunteered at a military hospital, where she met a shell-shocked GI, Corporal Paul Gennaro. He’d lost an arm, part of a leg, and maybe more. He had no family, no home to be shipped back to. As Saigon fell, she proposed to him, promising she’d always take care of him. It got them both shipped stateside.
For more than eighteen years she’d been married to the screaming.
To be honest, the history lesson was hard to follow, since Americans don’t know jack-shit about the world, or the wars we get into. I pieced most of this together later, from library books. At the moment, all I could say was, “Wow, you’ve sure had an amazing life.”
“America save me,” she replied. “But you know what I do now? Only one thing. Woman like me, here I only able do one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Own property. America not see me, people here never see me. They see money. See my money good. Eight property in Alameda. Vietnam, I design building. Here, I just own them.”
My only response was, “Huh.”
Then she said: “You hear him, my husband. You hear him in night.”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“I sorry. Very bad. They keep him hospital but now only for short time, each time. Drugs they give make worse, not better. I so sorry. Not want to bother you. No, no, no. You and your wife work hard. I see — she hard worker. Like me once.”
There was a big commotion out front a few days later. Cricket was freaking out, bouncing all over the living room. I realized what was happening and ran outside.
The raccoon was huge, practically filling the cage. It shook the trap viciously, its eyes burning red. Phi was standing casually nearby, staring at it. She had a baseball bat in her hands.
“Fig Newtons and fish sauce,” I said. “I’ll never doubt you.”
She handed me the bat. “Here. You do it.”
“Do what?”
“Kill it.”
“Kill it? I’m not going to kill it.” I was stunned. “There are people you can call, they’ll take it into the hills and turn it loose. Let’s just do that.”
“That cost money,” she scoffed. “You want to pay? It eat fish, eat my plants.” She shoved the bat into my hands. I took it, just to keep her from doing anything drastic. “I open cage,” she said, gesturing. “You smash quick.”
By now Laurie had appeared, rushing out in a robe and bare feet. She took one look, made an awful crying sound, and rushed back inside.
“I’ll pay to have it taken away,” I said. “I won’t kill it.”
She studied me. It felt like I was being examined under a microscope. “Maybe you not so handy.”
Later, when Raccoon Removal Service came to take the poor thing away — alive — Phi came out and stood next to me, watching them load it into the back of a van, where several other traps were already stacked, a half-dozen caged raccoons glowering warily. A guy in coveralls and heavy gloves did all the work. His partner sat in the passenger seat, wearing mirrored sunglasses. He only watched, a small grin never leaving his face.
Phi read my mind: “That one do killing.”
“Don’t say that,” I moaned.
“Your cat get hit by car, cannot walk. What you do?”
“Take care of it the best we can, of course.”
“It in pain, all the time. You think you help. But it in pain all the time. All it know — pain.” She stared up at me, her usually squinted eyes sharp as glass. “All it feel, ever — pain. Maybe then you do it. Maybe then you do what need be done.”
The screaming went on. And despite the misery — which had us seeking refuge at night in the living room, on separate couches, wearing earplugs — Laurie persevered. She started selling to stores in the area and steadily grew the account list and her territory. At all hours the fax machine in her office chugged away — a welcome sound in the night — spitting out orders from new buyers.
We’d succeeded. We’d achieved what all bright, young, hardworking American couples were supposed to achieve — but frustration was always there. We weren’t happy here anymore. Our heaven-sent sanctuary had been snatched away. We were living above a psych ward, its night terrors erupting just when we thought they might be over. The VA, I found out, had cut off any further in-hospital care for Corporal Paul Gennaro.
Laurie met her twin at a local craft show, a jewelry maker named Remy. She was soon spending more and more time at Remy’s studio loft in Jack London Square. They talked about teaming up to create a more expansive and profitable product line. Whenever they were together I was the outsider — even though I was the financial backbone of the operation. And though the business was growing, it was a long way from being in the black.
Then a terse e-mail notice arrived in my inbox at work: the company was moving to North Carolina. It was a shock, completely out of the blue. This was a gigantic firm, a cornerstone of Oakland’s economy. The idea that it could just abandon the city, dumping thousands of employees, was unthinkable, at least to a human being. But then, human beings don’t think like CEOs. Or their masters, the shareholders.
There was no way Laurie would move — she couldn’t uproot a business she’d worked so hard to build. If I relocated, regularly sending back paychecks until her business was self-sufficient... well, that wouldn’t work, either. I didn’t trust she’d need me when I came back. I convinced myself that losing my salary, losing my benefits, losing the monthly rent — it meant losing her. I had to find another job fast, or somehow replace the income I was about to lose.
Actually, that’s probably all bullshit. Just a way to rationalize what happened next. Something else entirely was at work, some gnawing part of me I didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. Something I’m only now starting to comprehend, all these years later.
Laurie was at a trade show in Los Angeles — with Remy, of course — when the screaming, incredibly, got even worse. Instead of jamming in the earplugs, or finding an after-hours bar, or getting a hotel room for the night, I stretched out on the bedroom floor, closer to it than ever, and absorbed the brunt of its horror.
If she could stand it, down there in hell’s black belly, so could I.
In the morning, before dawn, I rang Phi’s doorbell. She answered, looking drawn, haggard, and devoid of hope.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I said. “But it has to be tonight or tomorrow. Laurie will be back Monday morning.”
She stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed behind her. I laid out my conditions and she nodded sadly.
It happened that night, just as I figured. She’d been waiting a long time and wasn’t about to let the chance go by. She let me in a little after ten p.m. No one was on the streets and the televisions would still be on in nearby houses. The place was dark but what I could see, just as I expected, was tidy and immaculate. The floor plan was almost identical to ours, so it wasn’t difficult to navigate the shadows. She led me down the central corridor to the rear of the house. The place smelled strange, like incense mixed with disinfectant. We stopped at a closed door, directly beneath the bedroom Laurie and I shared.