The Family Recipe

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

1980, Seadrift, Texas

The journey to Seadrift was unceremonious.

The deeper Duc and Huey went into Texas, heading straight down toward the Gulf, the less anyone cared. A few stares here and there, but everyone else around them was too focused on their own survival to see the two lone Vietnamese men who suddenly appeared. Huey and Duc could each feel the other’s sense of relief. Perhaps the rumors and stories weren’t as bad as they had heard. Perhaps tensions were easing up after the two Vietnamese brothers had been acquitted of murder of the white fisherman, Billy Aplin, last year, on the grounds of self-defense.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

As soon as they entered the small coastal town of Seadrift, they followed signs until they found a shabby motel with a crooked logo and a burst pipe spewing sewage onto the main parking lot and bleeding into a nearby forest. Duc pulled up into it. They both crinkled their noses at the foul smell. But after all they’d been through, the conditions were still livable.

“I’ll call my cousin once we’ve settled in for a bit,” Duc said. “He’ll let us know when to show up for work.”

In the lobby, a fluorescent pendant crackling above them, Duc and Huey walked up to a middle-aged woman behind the wooden desk. Her hair hung loose in a low bun, and she had not one speck of makeup on her. She’d been chewing on the same piece of gum since 10:00 a.m.; it looked so hardened, it was as if she were chewing on caulk. Yet, somehow, she kept chewing, mauling and grinding away at the piece as if she had nothing better to do.

Duc opened his mouth, and before he could even get a word out, she dismissed him. “No vacancy.”

Huey glanced around, staring at the empty lobby, which looked like it hadn’t seen another human beside the receptionist in months. The room keys, hanging behind her, had gathered dust.

“Ma’am, there seems to be a lot of rooms,” Huey said, careful to hide his accent. “We’re just going to be here for a few days while we find permanent housing.”

“Do you not speak English?” she snapped, gnashing away at the hard gum even faster. “I said NO VACANCY. Understand? Comprende, amigo?”

Huey turned to Duc, lowered his voice, and switched to Vietnamese. “Let’s find another place. I don’t want to cause any trouble. We just got here.”

“You don’t think this woman isn’t going to call up every motel in town and tell them not to give us a room?” Duc whispered back angrily. “She’s going to drive us out. Have a backbone. You dream of being a lawyer? Start acting like one. Pretend you have a suit on, and fight back. Do something.”

“I’m not a lawyer. And why are you so damn insistent on fighting everyone?” Huey snapped, letting his voice accidentally get loud. The woman stopped chewing immediately, her mouth wide open, the white gum teetering on her tongue. Her eyes became larger after hearing the men speak in Vietnamese.

“The fuck you reading all the time for then?” Duc shot back, matching Huey’s volume. “All you do is read all day! You could barely look up from your damn books to help me drive us here! I had to do all the heavy lifting. I always do everything for us.”

Without realizing it, their volume had escalated higher and higher, unleashing pent-up anger and rage at each other. Ever since Duc and Huey had met on the Lady Freedom four years ago, they’d never once fought. Not through any of the hardships—the scams, over beers, cigarettes, sleeping in cars, or taking turns watching over each other sleeping at bus stops—had they ever once yelled. They were more than just brothers now; their roots to each other went deeper than the oldest tree in existence.

“What are you two saying in that filth language?” the receptionist interrupted. Though she whispered, her message was clear. Duc and Huey immediately stopped yelling long enough to see her left hand slowly make its way under the counter. Chills went through their heated bodies as each man blanched from the whiplash and PTSD of the war. Fear—fear is what they felt, running from American soldiers, North Vietnamese soldiers, South Vietnamese soldiers, from each other, away from the bombs, toward the helicopters, and now from this—fear of facing down another barrel of a gun and wondering if this was all life would be.

Their fears were confirmed when she pulled out a gun, aimed steady at them. “Y’all nothing but a bunch of ungrateful commies. Our sons die trying to save y’all over there and then you come here and go around killing us ? You take our jobs, take our resources, take our land, and then you kill us? I said no vacancy , what part of that y’all don’t understand? There are no rooms here, nothing for you in Seadrift. Your gook friends killed that fisherman, you understand?”

Duc raised both hands and tried to placate the woman, dialing up his charm, apologizing profusely for causing a disturbance. But it was too late. She bobbed the gun up and down, aimed so close at them that it would cause a bloodbath at such close range—tearing through every ligament, blood vessel, organ. Whoever she would decide to hit first, the blood would splatter on the survivor’s face. Huey even calculated how far the blood splatter would etch on the ceiling, wondering if it was better to be shot from a distance rather than up close.

Huey stole a glance at Duc, saw him close his eyes, like it was agonizing to see another gun. He was tired of surviving, Huey knew that—they both were—and he could even hear his companion’s thoughts: So what? So what if today was our last day? I could use the sleep.

Seeing Duc, carefree, resilient Duc, back down almost made Huey do the same. Yet a bolt of confidence surged through him, a sense that it was his duty to now stand firm.

“Ma’am, with all due respect, wasn’t it in self-defense?” Huey said finally. “Those two Vietnamese brothers who killed that fisherman said it was in self-defense.”

Duc’s eyes shot open.

“The Vietnamese men were acquitted,” Huey continued. “Don’t put that on us. That man attacked first with a knife. A local jury decided that verdict.”

“You think I give a shit what that jury thought? We don’t abide by what some fancy court thinks. And I certainly don’t give a shit what men in suits think,” she said, a dead laugh escaping her. She spit out the rock-hard gum, aiming it right at the center of Duc’s forehead. The gum slid down his face, leaving a snail mucus trail. She reached her right arm behind her, her left hand still aiming the gun at them, grabbed a room key, and tossed it at Huey’s head. “Y’all want so badly to have a room here? Go on, then. Go upstairs.”

Huey’s hands were still above his head, but he slowly stooped down and picked up the room key, ironically relieved, despite having a gun still pointed at him. But his grasp of the English language still had plot holes in it, and he was unable to pick up on her sarcasm.

“Thank you,” Huey said, his gratitude genuine.

“You are most certainly welcome. Go on then,” she said, flicking her gun at them to move along, smiling. “Room 204. Have a restful sleep.”

Just as Huey was about to thank the woman again, Duc interrupted him. “Drop the key,” Duc said quietly in Vietnamese. “We won’t survive the night. I heard they have the Klan patrolling the streets ever since the acquittal.”

But Huey continued staring at the key in his hand, churning it over and over in his palm.

All this mayhem over simply trying to get a motel room for one night, he suspected it would only continue to get worse here. Duc had gotten it all wrong. Seadrift wasn’t a safe haven for the Vietnamese, it had turned into a battleground since the acquittal of the two brothers, Nguyen Van Sau and Nguyen Van Chinh. In his short twenty-five years on this earth, Huey had already been at rock bottom more times than he could count. So what was one more time?

“Thank you again, ma’am,” Huey said, finishing his original thought, ignoring Duc’s continuous pleas to leave. “We won’t cause any trouble and we’ll be gone by the morning.”

Huey turned to Duc and spoke to him in English. “Pay her. I’ll go get our bags from the car.”

The woman laughed at Duc’s shocked face. “Looks like your friend is a gambling man with his life and with yours,” she said.

Duc unfurled crumpled bills and put them gently on the counter.

“See you Chinks in the morning, or whatever you are,” she said with a wink. “Thank you, come again,” she said in a mocking Sino-accent as Duc and Huey both left for the car.

As soon as they were in the parking lot, Duc turned toward Huey and shoved him. Again and again and again, Huey’s body hurled backward, until it hit the hot pavement. A sharp pain ran through his side, and instead of getting up, Huey lay there, sprawled out on the ground.

“Are you insane? We’re not staying the night,” Duc growled at him. “They’re probably calling the Klan right now.” From the ground, Duc towered over Huey, looking twenty feet tall. Both of the men’s eyes darted over to the lobby window, as they watched the woman talk rapidly to someone over the phone. Their eyes met, and she pulled a curtain over the window, shutting them out.

“We’ll take turns, keeping watch over each other, as we always have done,” Huey reasoned. “You wanted this, anh. Remember this moment. You wanted to come here. You started this.”

“I made a mistake, maybe my cousin was wrong. He said the work was good, he didn’t go into a lot of detail, he just said that folks were scared, but he just glossed it over. I didn’t realize a fucking war was happening here,” Duc exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air. “Am I not allowed to make a mistake? Let’s just head back to California. Tonight.”

Huey slowly sat up. The broken sewer pipe now spit out even more black and brown liquid. The smell more rotten than before. It poisoned his lungs. “Remember that day when we first met?”

“What about it?” Duc responded warily.

“You said one day, we’re going to buy that boat. That shitty, rusty boat we were on. And become richer than that captain, and all those men on that boat.”

Duc stared at Huey as if he had gone insane. “I think we have bigger problems than buying that damn boat right now. Can you please… just focus here?”

“Well, we haven’t gotten anywhere the past four years,” Huey said, still mulling over his thoughts out loud. “We’re both fishermen. It’s in our bloodlines. Our fathers were fishermen. Somewhere along the way, we stopped fishing with bait, and began fishing people’s pockets. Shouldn’t we finally start earning money in a clean way? Like how our fathers have done it? I’m done running, anh. I don’t want to keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing the past four years. Let’s just stay here, make our money the real way, and then leave.”

A silence hung in the air between the two men. Duc looked around the parking lot, making sure no one was watching them, except, he noticed, the receptionist, who was now peeking out from behind the curtain again, the phone still pressed hard against her ear, her mouth moving a million miles an hour. Duc reached down and pulled Huey up from the ground, and gestured for him to get inside their car. Once inside, he slammed his fist against the glove compartment, revealing a Glock half hidden beneath old hamburger wrappers and paper maps. Huey didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask how Duc had gotten a gun, when he had gotten it, and why he had one. He didn’t ask a single question.

“We may have been born as sons of fishermen, but we won’t become bait,” Duc said.

Huey didn’t say anything. He just brushed off the trash and picked up the gun, surprised that he hadn’t been hit with PTSD at the feel of it. Instead, the steel was cool in his palm, and he wasn’t sure if he should be afraid of the gun, of Duc, or of where they were. But Huey wasn’t a fool. He knew his options were limited in life and that they couldn’t go back to being the men they once were.

So Duc and Huey looked at each other, both silently acknowledging that the only way to find their place in America was to live outside the margins and operate in the shadows.