This declaration brought on an extended monologue from Roger. It went on and on and on and on. Alice wished she could have heard his voice. Whatever he was saying was lulling Aldah to sway slowly from side to side, as if rocked in the soft, sweet cradle of love.
This was how it could be, Alice thought, as she watched and listened: the beauty of innocent romance. Aldah had the trust of a baby. Never in the many times that she had sung “Rock-a-bye, Baby” to Aldah did she ever sing the last two lines. It would have been cruel to have the bough break. Aldah saw none of the dangers of love, and Alice didn't want her to. Lydia's romance was a mockery of love compared to what she was witnessing here. Lydia was taking a cheap ride at the carnival of love, and her cleverness would protect her when the bough broke. At that moment Alice couldn't envy whatever it was Lydia was into. But she envied what Aldah had.
14
It was a Monday night and Alice was studying when the phone rang. This was Roger's time to call Aldah, and Alice still hadn't heard his voice and wanted to, but it wasn't Aldah's lover boy. It was Mai, and her voice was panicked: “Something terrible just happened!”
Alice thought of Mai's mother, even though she had heard that Asian mountain people didn't have heart attacks or strokesâand why wouldn't Mai call 911 if there was a medical emergency?
“What's wrong?”
“They beat up Nickson!” Mai sucked two loud breaths of air. “They beat him up good!”
Sometimes the sounds of ambulance or fire engine sirens in Dutch Center carried to the Krayenbraak farm, and when something really bad happened they'd hear the wuff-wuffing sounds of a medical helicopter flying in from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Alice hadn't heard any sirens or helicopter, but she could see Nickson's small bloody body lying on a gurney in the Dutch Center hospital with puzzled white faces looking down on him.
“Where is he?”
“He's here. Mom's working on him.”
That had to be good news. A bloody nose. A scraped elbow.
“Did somebody from school do it?”
“Nobody from Midwest,” Mai said quickly. “Nickson didn't know them. He said they looked kind of funny, kind of nasty he said, not like most people you see in Dutch Center. It happened about an hour ago.”
“Were they Mexicans?”
“No, white guys, but it was close to the Mexican restaurant. He went out for a couple tacos and was taking a shortcut home through an alley.
These three guys followed him, yelled at him and called him a spic. Nickson said he took off, but they caught him and shoved him down and hit and kicked him. They were like animals, he said. They just piled on him like dogs. He almost passed out.”
“I'm coming over,” said Alice.
“You'd do that?”
“I'm on my way.”
Alice hung up the phone and yelled, “I need to run! Friend's in trouble. Explain later. Don't worry.” Alice ran out of the house so fast that she wouldn't be able to hear her parents if they did try to stop her.
Alice thought of a sleeping dog when she ran up to the 150 where it rested peacefully in the garage. When she turned the key and touched the gas pedal, it took off with a leap. It sprayed gravel as it left the driveway and within thirty seconds was going so fast down the gravel road that Alice didn't take the time to glance at the speedometer, but knew she was going much faster than usual when they were airborne over the railroad track and came down with a slush of gravel under the fenders. They laid rubber when they wheeled onto Highway 75 toward Dutch Center. They were flying. They were a red streak.
The front door to the Vangs' house was unlocked, and Alice ran in with her shoes on. Nickson was leaning over the kitchen table with one elbow propped on his calculus book, which made no senseâbut there it was: a beat-up kid with his elbow on his calc book. His right eye looked like a prune, but Lia had applied some gelatinous concoction that looked as if it might drip into his eye. His dark hair was speckled with bits of hamburger, grated cheese, and a sliver of taco shell. His right arm looked as if someone had gone to work on it with a cheese grater. He had been shoved down hard all right. His chest had a bootheel bruise that glowed maroon through his tan skin. He sat there, without a shirt, his shoulders glowing like a matte-finish photo. Lia was working on him, with Mai at her side. Nickson looked up.
“Yo,” he said.
His mother didn't look toward Alice but kept working, rubbing on spots that looked bruised and spots that didn't. Open containers of Bengay and Tiger Balm sat on the table. She held one hand on top of his head and rubbed with the other in a regular and smooth motion, like
somebody going after a stubborn spot on a pan with a scrub brush. With every sweep of her hand, Nickson gave a little growl.
He looked up again. “You didn't have to come,” he said. “You didn't have to.”
“I wanted to.”
“Thanks,” he said, then focused again on his mother's rubbing and responded with little grunts.
“You're welcome.”
It looked as if Lia was trying to rub away all the miseries of poor Nickson's flesh. Mai picked up the open container of Tiger Balm and held it to her mother to reload onto her fingers. Lia's face was all business. Her hands weren't shaking, and Alice could tell she had done this sort of thing before. She was following some kind of system with her rubbing, some kind of routine. With all the aromas swirling through the air, the kitchen didn't smell like a hospital emergency room. It smelled like a combination of a barbershop and a compost pile.
“The hospital's only a few blocks away,” said Alice.
Mai's response was a quick and sharp look. “Let's go out to the porch so Mom can concentrate,” she said.
On the porch Alice said, “He could be hurt bad. What if he has internal bleeding?”
“Mom saw a lot worse in Laos,” said Mai. “Mom used whatever she had strapped to her back or could find in the jungle and put people back together who were all shot up, full of shrapnel, bones sticking through the skin. Some of them were at the refugee camp. Should have heard them talking about her. Mom's seen it all. My uncle told me that when the spirits of the dead saw my mom coming, they turned tail and flew off.”
If Nickson was bleeding internally and died, Alice would never be able to forgive herself. She was a witness. She should have been calling someone.
“What are the police doing?”
“No police,” said Mai. “We can take care of this.”
Alice looked around the porch and out the window, as if expecting help to arrive. “Does anybody else even know about this?” she asked.
“He was cutting through the alley, taking a shortcut home. He would never have walked through an alley in Saint Paul, but it's supposed to be
so safe here, right? A couple of Midwest kids came out of the restaurant and heard him moaning. They helped him up and offered to take him to the emergency room. Nickson said to just take him home.”
“What did your mom say?”
“She told him he shouldn't go down an alley by himself again.”
A car slowed down as it approached the Vangs' house, slowed down and started angling toward the curb to park behind the Toyota station wagon. Alice expected it to be the police. The Midwest kids who found Nickson would have gone to the police and they were no doubt coming now for a report and to get a description of the thugs who beat him up. But it wasn't the police: it was Lydia and a young man. Alice knew it had to be the guy she was shacking up with. This was the last circumstance under which she wanted to meet Lydia's lawn-mower repairman.
They approached the porch door like people who were uncertain either of the address or of what they were doing here.
“It's my friend Lydia,” said Alice. “You remember her from church?”
“Of course,” said Mai.
“And I don't know the guy with her.”
Mai held the screen door open. “Hello,” she said in her hostess voice.
Lydia didn't look surprised to see Alice at the Vangs' house. Mai greeted her by name, then looked at Lydia's friend.
“This is my friend Randy,” said Lydia. “We know about your brother and have something to tell you. Randy, this is the Alice I'm always talking about.”
“Hi.” Alice held out her hand stiffly. She studied his hand as it came toward her and saw surprisingly clean fingers. She studied the rest of him. On first impression, he looked like a wholesome, decent young manâtall, slender, blondâand dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved, blue shirt with some kind of brand insignia on the left pocket. But his lips were the advertisement of the face: big wing-shaped lips that, when he smiled, didn't look wholesome or innocent. The lips were sly and scheming. Lips that showed practice. Dishonest lips. When he turned to shake hands with Mai, Alice saw only his buttocks bulging indecently in his tight jeans. Alice had been afraid this would be exactly the way she'd feel when she met him. She did not like her best friend's boyfriend one bit.
“Is Nickson going to be all right?” said Lydia. The question seemed
to come straight from her heart. Of course. This was her dear Lydia who, when she wasn't using her big brain to joke around, was using her big heart to look out for others.
“Yes,” said Mai. “He's banged up pretty bad, but he'll be all right.”
“We know who did it,” said Randy. Ah, so he was assertive too. Maybe Lydia had found somebody as confident as she was. The big difference would be that Lydia had reason to be confident. But this guy? This grease monkey?
Alice saw flames shooting from Mai's eyes as clearly as the streetlight outside. “You know who did it?”
“They're at Perfect Pizza in the mini-mall downtown right now,” said Lydia. “We heard them bragging and laughing about it. They thought they beat up a Mexican kid who dissed one of their friends.”
“Mistaken identity,” said know-it-all Randy.
“We'd just seen the boys from Midwest who found Nickson . . . ,” started Lydia.
“So we knew what these jerks were talking about,” interrupted Randy.
“We thought you should come with us to the police,” said Lydia.
“No police,” said Mai. This comment stopped the conversation. They all stared at her. “Did you say they were still at Perfect Pizza?” asked Mai in a cool, inquiring voice. Mai was acting too collected for comfort. Alice sensed a calm before the storm.
“They had just ordered when we left,” said Randy. “We thought you could get the police over there by the time the order was ready.”
“You really should call the police,” said Lydia.
Alice was watching Mai. It was clear to her that Lydia and Randy were not. They weren't noticing the gathering tightness behind Mai's relaxed exterior. Alice was. It wasn't a familiar tightening. It was foreign, but it was obvious, and Alice knew it was real.
“I don't want any of you involved in this,” said Mai. She was talking to Lydia and Randy. “You've done more than enough, and I thank you for it. But you can go now.”
“I wouldn't feel right,” said Lydia. “There must be something we can do.”
“Come on,” said Randy. “We're not needed here.”
“Are you sure?” she said to Mai.
“Absolutely,” said Mai. “One thingâwhat do they look like?”
“Can't miss them,” said Randy. “They're all about eighteen or so, all wearing black caps that they have on backwards. The little one has cowboy boots.”
“Thanks,” said Mai.
“Alice?” said Lydia.
“It's all right, it's all right,” Alice assured her. “Just go. It's all right.”
Randy and Lydia left and drove slowly off, the car wavering a little in its lane, as if it were as hesitant and confused as its occupants.
Mai's calm reserve transformed into quick action. She stomped back inside the house and returned in a moment carrying a woven handbag.
“Mai,” said Alice, “what is going on? What are you planning to do?” Then she saw a flash of metal in the handbag. “What on earth is that?”
Mai pulled it out and held it up. “It was my grandfather's,” she said. Whatever it was, it looked like something that belonged in the props for the fight scene in a high school production of
Macbeth.
It was a strange looking thing with a shining silver blade over a foot long that angled in two edges from the point. “For special occasions,” said Mai. “It was passed down to my father.”
“What on earth are you going to do with that thing?”
“What do you
think
I'm going to do with it?” she said. “He's my brother. Do you understand that? Nobody beats up my brother.”
“You can't be serious.”
Alice felt as if she was seeing the world from inside her mother. This is what her mother saw: a world in which solutions were no longer a choice. It wasn't a fear for herself or for Mai exactly. It was a bigger fear, a fear so big that it didn't feel like fear. Not fear for themselves as individuals, but fear at the image of what humans could become. When violence began to feed on itself, a self-perpetuating monster. It was a pure, detached fear of the
terrible
coming to earth.
Mai held the dagger like someone who was ready to use it. When Alice locked eyes with her, she saw more than fire. Mai was approaching a precipice and could ruin her life in one crazy mindless moment. But Alice had signed on to something, and now something large and powerful in her was rising against her will to join in collusion with Mai's rage. It was a rush of energy. She could double Mai's strength, maybe
triple it. Her teeth clenched involuntarily as she imagined grabbing one of the thugs, jerking his head back, while Mai slit his throatâor at least beat him into unconsciousness with that strange weapon. One after another, a heap of thugs bleeding like pigs on the floor of the restaurant.