Tiger Girl (15 page)

The white crocodile had appeared in Phnom Penh in the first year after the fall of the old government, after it became clear that Prince Sihanouk would not return. Workers spotted it lurking in the shallows of the Mekong where factory effluent poured directly into the muddy water. Then refugees from bombed-out villages swore they'd seen it crawling in the shadowy overgrown alleyways where they sold fruit. The rumors grew more urgent:
The white crocodile is hungry. It eats small children and dogs. Teach your children to run, fast
. Every missing person became a sign that the crocodile was near. The police stayed clear, but a group of soldiers came and shot up a farmer's fruit stand, saying the smell of rotting papaya in the sunlight was attracting the beast. The rumors continued, spreading like
a summer influenza from the shanties to the street markets to the schools and temples and churches. At the cathedral, a priest offered up a Mass and the penance of his parishioners if God would remove the monstrosity. Monks and their novices chanted through the night: the white crocodile has returned, the world is ending, a new world is dawning. Over and over, their prayers drifted on the wind, thick as incense. It was hard to tell if the monks were mourning or rejoicing.

My brother was different. For him, the white crocodile was an opportunity.

He was still in primary school, maybe eight, nine years old, when he convinced his friends that they should not only skip class to look for the white crocodile, but that they should also capture it. He'd even thought of where to put it—in the courtyard pond of his best friend Arun's house.

“Your yard is the biggest. You have a fish pond.” My brother ticked off its crocodile-worthy attributes on his long, tan fingers. “Plus, now that your father has broken his leg, he won't think to look in the back. And the servants are too busy to bother with the yard.”

Arun's lips quivered. He picked at his nose as though there were a direct pathway to his brain that could be tapped if he only dug deep enough. “I don't know. My mother will get angry at me.”

“Your mother!” My brother laughed. “Ha ha. Arun's afraid of his mother!”

The other boys laughed, uncertain. They were young, after all. They were all in fact afraid of their own mothers. They were not sure how to turn on a friend and make something ordinary seem like a moral flaw. Soon they would, but not quite yet.

My brother was ahead of his time.

The next morning all four of the boys went to school as usual under the watchful eyes of their family servants. They
waved politely from the school yard, waiting for their escorts to turn the corner and disappear from sight. Then one by one, the four boys ran back through the school's front gate and down the broad street, meeting under the flame tree across from the fried-cricket stand as planned.

My brother commandeered a
tuk-tuk
to take them to the slums, where their families would never let them go. They clambered into the back seat of the brightly painted wooden cart attached to the small moped. The driver was a teenager, barely out of boyhood himself, but he confidently headed into the crowded streets, steering around oxcarts and bicycle-powered cyclos. The boys were thrilled to be out of school and in the thick of the city. They waved cheerily at the honking Renault 2CVs and the occasional black Mercedes that sped past them. The
tuk-tuk
wove around garbage and potholes and bands of street children coming to beg. No matter how bad the terrain, the young
tuk-tuk
driver could navigate without tipping over.

That's when my brother realized how useful this teenager might be. When they finally stopped at the edge of a row of shacks where the dirt road ended at the river's bank, my brother invited their driver along. “Come with us and we'll buy you something to eat.” The boy, fresh from a village, had no reason not to trust them, my brother said.

Together, my brother, his friends, and the
tuk-tuk
driver walked to the bank of the river. There they saw many dead and discarded things: bloated fish, drowned lizards, a shoe, a man's leg. And then, in the shallows, insects buzzing around its yellow eyes, was a baby crocodile, already more than a foot long. It appeared lost, too young to be away from its mother. It looked emaciated, pale, sick. Not dark like ordinary crocodiles, but chalk-colored. The boys approached, and the crocodile startled. It tried to head to deeper water, but it was caught. It thrashed about, its hind leg trapped in a plastic soda ring,
the kind that arrived with the Americans, holding their cans of Coca-Cola together. Trash thrown into the river had trapped the baby crocodile on the bank and kept it from returning to its mother, and now it lay dying in the hot sun.

My brother told the
tuk-tuk
driver to go pick it up. “I'll buy you ice cream when we get back to the city,” he said.

“What's ice cream?” the driver asked.

“The best food in the world,” my brother said.

“I want rice soup noodles,” the driver said, bargaining. “I want an egg.”

“Fine, a bowl of soup noodles with an egg in it, but you have to go down there and pick up that crocodile and bring it back to us.”

The driver looked at the creature dying in the dried mud.

“I'll buy a whole bowl of noodle soup just for you.”

“With an egg,” the driver said.

“I promise. With an egg.”

The driver smiled widely, believing he'd gotten the better end of the bargain, and scampered down among the detritus along the riverbank. He pushed through the thick reeds and edged past the garbage, the rotting human leg, and the leather shoe, until finally he was standing on the dried mud. He was leaning over to pick up the crocodile when the creature whipped its tail once and bit the teenager on the finger.

“Ow!” he cried out, loudly.

“You're okay. You're bigger than he is. He can't hurt you,” my brother coached, from the safety of the road. “Go on, grab him. Just hold his mouth together with your hands and pull him up.”

The driver looked unsure. He held his bleeding finger in the air.

“I can see your finger. You're fine. It's not a big bite. Just be fast this time. Come on! Do you want your soup noodles or not?”

The teenager wiped his bleeding finger on the back of his
sampot
and charged at the crocodile. He kept his hands outstretched and danced around the crocodile, which flipped its tail feebly and made a second, halfhearted lunge at the driver. This time the teenager was prepared. He grabbed the crocodile's neck with one hand and clamped the other around its mouth. Then he pulled the creature from the earth and ran back up the riverbank toward the road, smiling broadly.

“Good job!” my brother said. “Now we need something to carry it in.” He ordered one of his friends to empty his school satchel to hold the crocodile. “Wait. Don't let go of it yet,” my brother commanded the driver. He uprooted a reed from the side of the road and wrapped it around the crocodile's snout. “There,” he said, satisfied, and they stuffed the beast into the book bag.

They climbed back into the
tuk-tuk
, setting the thrashing satchel on the seat of the moped, and the driver, standing balanced on the pedals, drove them back into the city.

But when they paused at an intersection, waiting for an elephant to pass, a police officer spotted the crocodile's tail poking out of the bag and ordered the driver to stop. “What have you boys got there? Come here!”

My brother grabbed the satchel with the crocodile, and he and Arun took off in one direction, his two classmates in the other. The police officer decided to cut his losses and grabbed the driver, pulling him off his moped.

From a hiding place behind a stand where a woman sold drinks from a bucket, my brother watched as the police officer dragged the teenager off and another officer confiscated the vehicle.

My brother said he felt bad the driver had been caught, but he figured there was nothing he could do. He didn't want to get caught himself and be forced to give up the crocodile.

So he and Arun waited until the cops disappeared and then hired a cyclo driver to take them back home.

While the servants were busy, the boys dumped the crocodile in the fishpond in the courtyard garden of Arun's house, but the beast was listless. It floated to the side of the pond and stayed there, refusing to wreak havoc among the goldfish as they'd hoped.

The next morning the baby crocodile was dead. The gardener found it floating on the surface of the pond, belly up. Arun's mother called to complain, but my brother said our mother didn't have the heart to punish him. He said he was lucky our father never found out about the escapade.

The servants would gossip for months afterward. How had the crocodile gotten into the yard? Where had it come from? And what had given it such a ghostly color?

“I used to wonder if I'd caused it all,” my brother said. “If everyone was right about the white crocodile. If I'd caused all the bad things to happen.”

“You were just a boy,” Uncle said. “And it's just a superstition.”

“I know,” said my brother. “But that's how I thought.”

Uncle looked away, as though he felt even guiltier than he had before.

“I wonder what happened to the
tuk-tuk
driver,” I said, at the end of the story. “Did you ever see him again?”

“Him? Ha. That kind of person was king under Pol Pot. That kind of boy had it easy.” Then he laughed a bitter
ha ha ha
, which made me realize how much anger he held inside his bones.

Don't keep a thin tiger as a pet
.

—traditional Cambodian proverb

Back at the apartment, I could tell Paul was disappointed. He looked around at the bare walls, the spartan furnishings, the small kitchen, and I knew he was weighing the present against the heft of his memories: the three-story home, the courtyard, the servants. He stood in the very center of the living room, in front of the couch that was now my bed, looking this way and that, pigeonlike, as though his eyes couldn't quite focus on the smallness of the place, as though he thought that if he found just the right angle he'd discover the magic portal that opened up to the penthouse he'd been longing for.

“How many buildings does he own?” he asked me while Uncle rummaged in the closet.

I shrugged, because it seemed better than saying, “None.”

Paul paced back and forth from the door to the window, looking down upon the crabgrass lawn, the parking lot, the street. He could bound across the width of the apartment in three large steps. He paused at the window, squinting into the sun.

Uncle brought out clean sheets, blankets. “I'm sorry you'll have to sleep on the floor until I can buy you a mattress.”

Paul smiled politely. “Thank you.”

Then they sat down at the kitchen table while I boiled water for tea. Uncle seemed dazed. I imagined that a deer that
had been struck by a moving vehicle might stagger off a road with the same look that Uncle had on his face.

Over cups of black tea, Uncle asked about Paul's life now. Paul said he'd been working in L.A., nothing special, just jobs to get by. He'd escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand when he was fourteen. As an unaccompanied minor, he'd been put with another family in the camp, and they had been sponsored to come to America as a group. All his papers filed with the Red Cross and the INS and his schools had this family's name on it. After he got to America, he didn't dare tell anyone that that wasn't his name. The family said that if the government found out they'd lied, he'd be sent back to Cambodia or forced to fend for himself in the refugee camp. Then when he got older, the family said he owed them for taking care of him, and made him pay them back, made him work for them for free. He didn't want to be their slave, so he ran away at seventeen. He'd been working ever since. This and that, any odd job he could find to get by, since he hadn't been able to go on with school. He still remembered what he'd learned in Chinese school in Phnom Penh, so he was able to get work in Chinatown, first as a stock boy, then as a waiter. Sometimes he'd helped a bookie collect on debts. That was when he'd learned to dress tough. A lot of violence could be avoided just through intimidation. He'd done some landscaping, construction. He'd tried to put some money aside to start his own business someday.

Uncle nodded. “You can live with me. You can work with me.”

“How many donut shops do you have? How many apartments?”

He was disappointed to learn Uncle had only one of each.

I knew he was going to be even more disappointed to learn that Uncle was no longer rich and donated away his pastries to the church and to all his volunteer projects.

“I remember our house,” Paul said softly, shaking his head. “I remember our Mercedes. I remember you wore a suit, with a tie, and leather shoes to go to work.”