The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Read online

  After a moment he said, “I choose to keep company with monsters simply because I can.” He then smiled politely, but in a way that told me it was time to go.

  The hours on the road were long, but they were never really lonely. Most of the time I had somebody tagging along for a ride to the city or back from it. The ones I brought up to Saigon were always kids fresh off the farm: tired of living with their parents and looking for excitement. They seemed all the more innocent because they thought they were so worldly. The ones I returned south with were older, sadder. They had discovered that excitement is really just smog and noise and never seeing the stars, and trash piled up in the streets. They would ride with their heads out the window, their faces softening as the city fell away and the world turned flat and emerald-colored again; they were waiting for the moment when we crossed into their province, when they would smack the dashboard and cry out, “Here! Here!”

  I dropped them off on the side of the highway and drove away, but I always watched in the rearview mirror as they started walking through the fields in the direction of their village. Someone else would give them a lift sooner or later.

  Driving at night you have your jumpy moments, sure. From Saigon to Can Tho City there’s not much except your skinny strip of asphalt cutting through rice paddy for 125 miles, and those 125 miles are very, very dark. And when things slither across the road, or weird lights bob out in the fields … Our grandmothers told us the stories. Our muddy patch of the world was already shadowy and blood-soaked and spirit-friendly long before the Americans got here. There’s ancient and ugly things waiting to harm you in that darkness. Yes, of course they’re there in daylight, too—they’re just harder to spot. I’m not by any means a small man. I’m not the man you’d pick a fight with if you could help it. But I do get jittery sometimes.

  Still, I’ve only been really scared once. That story’s not as good as the one about the shark, but I’ll tell it to you anyway, just because you’re still listening.

  IT WAS AFTER THE WAR, so I wasn’t young anymore, but I was still good-looking enough that girls I didn’t know would address me as “Older Brother,” and not “Uncle.” That afternoon I was up in Saigon, out by the hospital in District 5 to pick up crates of bandages, syringes, burn ointment, and cough medicine. Every month or so I would run a standard medical shipment like this.

  I’d finished loading the truck and securing the crates and had turned my attention to scraping the last bits of supper from my tin—steamed pork intestines and cabbage that my wife, saintly woman, had packed for me the day before. Then from behind me, someone cleared her throat. I turned: There, standing in the doorway to the hospital, was the prettiest little thing in a starched white uniform. The nurse was peach-colored and plump in all the right places, one stockinged leg crossed behind the other, with bits of dark hair escaping from their pins and eyelashes so long they cast curving shadows on her cheeks.

  “Pardon me, but are you driving south?” the girl asked, in a voice as sweet as she looked.

  I put down my dinner and swallowed hard. “All the way down to Ca Mau, Little Sister. You can’t go much farther south than that.”

  “Will you be going through Dong Thap province?”

  “Dong Thap? The place is a real swamp, but I could swing through no problem, no problem at all.”

  “And,” she left the doorway and sauntered right up to me, heels clip-clopping, “do you have room for a passenger?”

  I brushed a lock of loose hair back behind her ear and her face grew hot but she didn’t flinch. “I’ve got plenty of that,” I said. This ride was going to be fun.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have anything to pay you with …”

  “Oh, I don’t want your money, Little Sister.”

  Her pink lips suddenly sharpened into a smile. “Wonderful!” she said. “I’ll go get him then.”

  “Him?”

  “Wait here.” She darted back inside the hospital. Cunning little bitch. I packed up dinner and went to piss behind a bus stop, cursing quietly. When I came back she had returned with a boy who could have been anywhere from eleven to eighteen years old, possibly even older. He was dressed in a pair of faded blue pajamas; the top had no buttons so it hung open to reveal his wasted torso—the kind of skinny that I hadn’t seen since the early seventies. His rib cage looked like it might break through the skin at any moment. His face was ashen, with bruise-colored rings around the eyes, and his hands shook where they dangled at his sides. But it was the way he smelled that troubled me the most. The boy was sick bad, anyone could see that, and sick people smell like sweat and shit and piss and puke. But his smell was different. Sort of cold, cold and metallic. Like a very clean knife.

  “This your brother or boyfriend or something?” I asked, trying to conceal my unease.

  “No, this is Minh,” the nurse said cheerfully. “Minh is about to die.” As if in response, Minh let his mouth fall slack and released a cough that rattled his entire body. I didn’t doubt her words. “But,” the nurse continued, “he wants to die back in his village. Not here, not alone in Saigon.” There were tiny lines at the corners of the nurse’s eyes. She wasn’t nearly as young or as pretty as I’d thought. “You’ll take him there.” It did not appear to be a question.

  I looked the kid over some more. He didn’t look like he would even last the five hours to Dong Thap. I should have said no. I was going to. But when I looked down at his feet, I saw that the boy was wearing a pair of slippers fashioned out of carefully folded newspapers. It was those newspaper shoes that did me in. I couldn’t refuse a poor little bastard who was inches from the grave but was still too dignified to walk around barefoot. “I’m not going to get in any trouble, right? The doctors won’t mind me driving off with him like this?”

  The nurse cocked an eyebrow at me. “Do you have any idea how many patients are in this hospital? We’ve got two to each bed, and two on mats on the floor beneath them. Honestly, the doctor’ll be glad to have him gone.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it.” I climbed into the driver’s seat. “But I’m doing you a big favor. This is a delivery truck, not a taxi.”

  The nurse led the boy around to the passenger side and helped him in. He immediately pulled his legs up to his chest in the seat and buried his face between his knees. The vertebrae of his neck jutted up like the ridges of a giant lizard. Nurse gave him a farewell pat on the head and then turned on her little white heels to leave without thanking me. After a moment she stopped mid-stride.

  “Ah, Older Brother, I forgot to tell you something very important,” she said, looking at me over her shoulder, one hand positioned on one round hip. I stuck my head out the window expectantly. “You shouldn’t tell Minh your name. In fact, it would be better if you don’t say anything to him at all. But especially not your name. If it should come up, do try to hold your tongue.”

  Now this was too much. “First you trick me into taking a corpse off your hands, and now you won’t even let me talk to it! Giving me orders! You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Little Sister.” I put the truck into reverse and began to pull away, and then slammed on the brake again, feeling indignant. Minh pitched forward a bit in the passenger seat but didn’t fall over. “You,” I called out the window, “are a bad girl. A wicked girl. And there’s nothing in the world worse than that. If my wife behaved like you I would thrash her with a jackfruit skin! If I ever have a daughter I plan on beating the disobedience out of her daily! I really should teach you a lesson right here, but I’m too soft to do it.”

  The nurse did not appear admonished like she should have been. In fact, her face broke out into a rather toothy and unladylike grin. “Older Brother, you’re fun,” she said. “But you’re wrong—there are some things worse than wicked girls.” Her smile stretched a centimeter wider. “And they’re more dangerous than you can imagine. So you’d better be careful should you encounter one of them.” As I released the brake, she called out one last time, “Remember!” and then she w
as out of sight.

  The boy remained motionless for the first hour of driving, hugging his knees with only his mop of hair visible. He coughed periodically, so I knew he wasn’t dead yet. Traffic ebbed away quickly after we left the city; once we crossed the second river it was just us, the occasional motorbike, and out in the paddy the distant figures of either scarecrows or skinny farmers—you really can’t tell the difference, since they both wear tattered clothes and conical hats.

  After another forty-five minutes I couldn’t stand it anymore. I need some noise when I’m in the truck—it doesn’t have a radio, and when you spend hours driving in silence through fields that are indistinguishable from one another you start going out of your mind. You begin to wonder if you’re even moving, out in the middle of all that soundless green. Times when I’m passengerless I’ll just tell stories to the truck and imagine that the rumbling of the engine is it talking back because I need it, else I won’t know I’m still alive. Of course I remembered what the nurse had said, about speaking to him, but there are only two kinds of people, those who can ignore their mosquito bites and those who scratch, and it’s the quiet that makes me itchy.

  “Little Brother…,” I started, unsure whether or not I had chosen the proper term of address, for I really couldn’t tell his age at all. Minh slowly adjusted himself so that he was facing me but kept his head resting on his knees. I continued, “Are you hungry? I’ve got some leftover meat and greens in the tin down there. It’s a little cold now, but you can have it if you want …”

  I didn’t think it was possible, but at the suggestion of food Minh looked even more ill. Immediately his face went lichen-colored and he looked at the container as if it were about to explode. “Okay! It’s okay! I was just offering!” It was clear that a topic change was in order, and since there was really no need for tact—the boy was dying, after all—I asked him: “So what’s the matter with you then?”

  For the first time Minh smiled. Even his smile looked painful. “Is it not obvious? I am dying.”

  His voice caught me off guard: He spoke clearly and strangely formally, with a clipped northern accent that you rarely heard around these parts of the delta. “Erm. Yes. But why are you dying? Did the doctors tell you what it was?” I kicked myself for having forgotten to ask the nurse if it was catching or not.

  “My current body is simply too sick to continue living. So now I am dying.”

  “Yes, but … Oh never mind.” Something was apparently wrong with the boy’s head as well. He probably had some new disease, from America or Europe. But I’ve never had a sickness I couldn’t cure with the proper amount of rice wine, so I wasn’t that worried. The minutes passed slowly and silence returned, gloating.

  Desperate, I tried again. “What was the hospital like?”

  To my surprise he raised his entire head when he replied. “Filthy. Vile. Foul. There were no healthy people to talk to and I was always hungry.” The very memory of the place caused Minh to relapse; he dropped his head back between his knees and released five coughs—short, hoarse barks—in quick succession.

  I figured that that would be the end of our conversation, and that Minh would go back to silence, preserving his last dregs of energy. So I was taken aback when, after a few moments, his face reappeared. We were heading southwest, and in the orangey light of the setting sun he even looked slightly healthier. “Older Brother,” he asked me, “have you been a deliveryman long?”

  “Almost twenty years,” I said. Even though he’d caught me off guard I attempted a clumsy lure: “So I must have been at the job before you were even born, right?”

  Minh didn’t fall for it and instead went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Will you tell me about it?”

  I slowed the truck down a little. “The years on the road? There isn’t much to tell, and what there is isn’t interesting…,” I began, and cleared my throat.

  Minh looked at me blankly. “Why would you say that, when you are smiling and it is plain that you have been waiting this whole time to talk about yourself?”

  I almost swerved off the road, hearing those words coming from someone who was my junior. But there was no impudence in his voice. He sounded genuinely puzzled. When he saw the shock on my face he said, “I now understand; it was self-deprecation meant to ease me into your story. Continue.”

  How do you respond to something like that? I certainly didn’t know. After a long, awkward minute, Minh saved me the trouble of stammering out some sort of response. “I gather from your silence that I have caused you to be embarrassed and I apologize. Please say something. Hearing your voice lends me strength.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I’m flattered, I guess. What would you like me to tell you about?”

  “I want you to give me your life story, beginning with your birth and ending here, in this truck. Tell it however you will, but omit as little as possible. I will not interrupt you.”

  “I suppose I can do that.” I took a deep breath and began. “I was born in Ca Mau.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. His face was cast with weirdly shaped shadows from the sunset behind him, and his profile had gone hazy at the edges in its light. He was staring dead ahead with his mouth dangling open, which I found mildly unsettling. I turned my attention back to the road and kept talking, more as a way to forget about my odd passenger than to fulfill his request.

  “It feels strange to be the one speaking. Usually the people riding with me only want to talk about themselves and their big plans for when they get to the city or get away from it. When they speak to me it’s like me speaking to my truck. I wouldn’t think that a person getting ready to die would want to hear someone else’s life story. A dying man tells his own stories to anyone and everyone on the off chance that later on, one of them will remember he existed. A dying man shouldn’t have time to listen to a man like me. But you’re not like the others, are you?” I looked over at him again but he had not moved. “I honestly can’t tell if you’re bored or if you’re gobbling up every word out of my mouth. Maybe you’re just too sick to talk anymore.” Still no reaction. He was being true to his word about not interrupting me. “I was the fourth of seven children. It’s fitting that I’m the middle child—the three older siblings went off one by one to work in Saigon, the youngest three stayed in Ca Mau and took care of our parents, and I’ve spent my life driving back and forth between the two.”

  When we drove through Tan An, I was six years old and having my legs caned for stealing mangoes from a neighbor’s tree.

  Waiting for the My Tho ferry I was fourteen and as a joke dumped a pot of water on a female classmate. The thin fabric of her white school uniform turned translucent and exposed her tiny breasts.

  Crossing into Ben Tre I was nineteen and marrying her.

  Leaving it I was almost twenty-five and driving down the highway with a shark in the back of my truck.

  I was talking so much that I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. And how dark. Three motorbikes passed us in streaks of yellow light and briefly lit up the coconut trees lining the highway. I could smell a river in the near distance.

  “Minh—” I stopped and coughed. My voice was hoarse, probably from speaking for too long. I tried again. “Minh, let’s stop for a minute. I … I feel … tired. All of a sudden.”

  I pulled the truck over and stepped onto the road. And then, without warning, both my legs gave out. I held myself up on the door until, to my surprise, Minh himself came over and took my weight on one of his shoulders. I worried that I was hurting him but had no choice but to lean against him. He walked me over toward the trees and lowered me onto the ground because I could no longer stand.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong,” I said, rubbing my legs. “Out of nowhere I went all—” I was interrupted by a dry coughing fit that lasted over a minute. “I went all weak. Why am I so dizzy?”

  His voice from the shadows: “You were sitting for several hours. It is normal.”

  Perhaps it was because
he had been silent for so long, but his voice sounded lower to me. In any case I couldn’t respond because I was coughing again.

  Minh stood on the shoulder of the road instead of on the grass. It was probably for the best—the ground had muddy patches and his shoes were made of newspaper. “Driving is difficult work, Older Brother. Your life has been a hard one. It’s time to rest now.”

  “Strange way to put it, but—cough—you’re—cough cough—right.”

  “Older Brother, I know everything else about you, but you still have not told me your name.”

  I remembered the words of the nurse again and hesitated. Lucky I did, for just then a motorbike drove by and its headlight illuminated the two of us. And in that sudden instant of light I saw that something about Minh had changed. When we left Saigon, the boy’s cheeks had been sunken, his eyes hollow, his skin gray and drooping. But somehow, miraculously, the face was now full and fresh. His eyes had become bright and alert; the dark rings beneath them had vanished. He looked like an entirely different person. I jerked away from him.

  “Is something wrong, Older Brother?”

  Everything was wrong. His face, my body, whatever was happening to us. I tried to stand but my legs were still not my own and my head swam. I started crawling away from Minh on my hands and knees instead, and for the first time he laughed.

  He let me make it a couple of yards before he walked carefully over, feeling for dry spots before putting a foot down. He kicked me onto my back with one newspaper-clad foot. Even in the dark I could tell that he had grown larger, his chest and shoulders broader.

  “Now, will you tell me your name or do I need to search the truck for your license and find it that way?”