Chapter 31
CHAPTER 31
April 1981, Seabrook-Kemah, Texas
Rumors had spread all throughout Harris County, down to Seadrift, and all along the coast. Whispers that the Klansmen had killed Tu?n and that he had fought them off bravely, sacrificing himself to save the others. Was Tu?n a hero? He had single-handedly fought off their enemies to ensure a better future for his unborn son and for every Vietnamese in Texas. Tu?n was a hero. Right?
Duc, Huey, V?nh, and Eddie hadn’t spoken since that night, and no one made any motion to correct the rumors. The four men buried their shame and thinned their lips. They allowed the rumors to run wild that Tu?n had been a sacrificial lamb. Because the truth was much more sinister and harder to swallow. That Tu?n had just been drunk and had fallen overboard. And that none of the men had noticed in time because they were also drunk and scared. They could have saved him.
“Let’s leave town tonight,” Duc said to Huey quietly as they walked side by side down Bay Avenue, swift and rushed. They wanted to avoid the moonlight and eye contact with strangers. There was an invisible curfew in place, because not a soul would chance to be out late ever since the Klansmen set the sixty-day mark. But everyone knew that four walls and a roof couldn’t stop the Klansmen’s threats from wafting in, invisible and noxious as they were.
“You want to leave? Tonight? ” Huey responded. He could taste his dinner of expired catfish and fermented fish paste coming back up. But all he could think about was Evelyn, pregnant and alone. In a moment of frustration, he shoved Duc. He’d never laid his hand on him in that way, out of pure anger. He wondered what it’d feel like to push him harder, and the thought seemed so freeing. “You know I never wanted to come here in the first place. I begged you not to come down here. We should have left when those racists at the motel threatened us on the first day. And now you’re ready to leave? After we’ve killed Tu?n?” Huey’s breathing was unstable, and he could feel something in his system. Doubt had begun to poison his mind, wondering why he ever decided to follow Duc around in the first place. Why was he so weak? So weak he couldn’t figure out how to be on his own? That he had to rely on a charlatan?
Duc stopped dead in his tracks, shocked that Huey had the balls to get physical. He turned angry and shoved Huey back harder. The impact was harsher and pushed Huey back almost a foot. There was meaning behind that shove and a strange glint in Duc’s eyes.
“Don’t you fucking say that to me. You know it was an accident. Blaming ourselves isn’t going to solve anything. Tu?n was drunk. He drank too much. He’s always drunk a bottle more than he should have. That’s on him if he couldn’t handle it,” Duc said defensively. “You’re beating yourself up over nothing. He might not even be dead. Maybe the poor bastard washed up on shore somewhere and he’s just in the hospital with amnesia, like in the goddamn movies. No one found the body. Stop blaming us. Stop blaming me .”
“You’re the one who was fucking around! You kept pressing him to drink when he didn’t want to! He’s got a fucking kid on the way!” Huey shouted. “What about Evelyn?”
“Who fucking cares?! Fuck him, and fuck Evelyn! We need to look after ourselves now.”
“Fuck you!” Huey shouted, blinded by rage. All he could see was Evelyn, cradling her bump, standing on shore, waiting for Tu?n every night since the accident. The image haunted him. He hadn’t been able to sleep a full night ever since.
“FUCK YOU !”
“You’re fucking selfish, always have been. I’m sick of following you around. All you do is cause destruction wherever you go.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re a spineless fuck. Look how far I’ve gotten us. Without me, you’d just be nothing but a weak loser. You were weak back in Vietnam and you’re fucking weak here! You’re a loser, just like your loser father! An uneducated fisherman’s son will always be nothing more than an uneducated fisherman’s son.”
No one knew who threw the first punch.
But in the heat of the moment, no one cared.
Huey and Duc only cared about harming each other, releasing years of pent-up frustration and repressed anger. In a tangle of sweaty limbs, under a clear night sky in Texas, two Vietnamese refugee fishermen recklessly exchanged blows. Huey was thrown against the side of a building by Duc, whose stocky frame served him well as he managed to form a foundation and trap Huey’s lower half with his legs. Duc’s arms came swinging from each side as Huey felt indents along his rib cage, some deeper than others. Duc’s fingers managed to crawl up his thick neck, wrapping his hands around it, squeezing it as if it were nothing more than a condiment bottle, forcing Huey to gasp for spurts of air. In between gasps of air, he rammed his elbows down on Duc’s back, trying to throw him off. From afar, it looked as if Duc was winning; his brow was steeped in sweat, and his calves defined and relentless. But he was losing energy. Somehow in all the chaos, Huey managed to wrap his arms under Duc’s exposed armpits and lift him off the ground.
With a fierce roar, Huey shoved him as far back as he could, barreling into him like a rocket, until Duc crashed into the rickety wood fencing on the other side of the pier’s boardwalk. Losing his footing, Duc nearly tumbled backward across the fence.
Panic bloomed on his face as he shouted in fear. He finally realized what he’d be falling into. The water was black, thick, and foolishly looked like solid land to the ignorant eye.
But Duc knew better.
Even if it was his push, Huey also knew better. He imagined his friend wasn’t just seeing his own life flash before his eyes; he also saw Tu?n’s life. Fear of tumbling into the Gulf, fear of drowning, fear of escaping Vietnam when Sài Gòn fell, fear of not being able to swim, fear of being gutted like the fish they gutted every day, or perhaps, fear of seeing Tu?n’s face at the bottom of the Gulf floor, his expression frozen in time, his hands still outstretched, waiting for someone to pull him out of the water. But Tu?n wasn’t just waiting for anybody; he had been waiting for them, his closest friends, to pull him out.
That night on the boat, Huey remembered hearing a splash hit the water. But the sound of the gun going off had put them all into survival mode. In the grand moral Richter scale of the universe, his life was far more important than anyone else on that boat. But he could have checked. Why didn’t he notice Tu?n was missing? It was that sick, sinking feeling in his gut, that something terrible had happened, and if he stopped, he’d have to acknowledge it was all his fault.
Duc closed his eyes, and Huey felt maybe he was accepting his fate. His punishment, the freezing Gulf that would soon drag him down into its depths. But Huey couldn’t stand it. After all this time together, if Duc were to fall, then Huey should, too.
Huey yanked Duc by the back of his shirt, dragging him back down before he tumbled over the fencing. Together, they collapsed on the wooden planks of the pier, their chests heaving up and down, their sweat dripping down their arms and legs. The brothers in all but blood sat side by side, silently, each one recovering, lost in their thoughts. Huey eventually made the first gesture, and patted Duc on the back, a small semblance of an apology for almost having thrown him over into the water. And Duc being Duc, he merely grunted a response back, took out a pack of rolled-up cigarettes, and handed one to Huey, stuck one in his own mouth, and lit them both up.
“What now?” Huey asked forlornly, the cigarette dangling between his lips.
“Let’s sell whatever is left of the boat, take what money we can get, and go,” Duc said quietly. “We can head northeast again, back to Philly. I still have some good buddies up there. Hell, we can go even farther north, cross the border. I hear a lot of people have immigrated to Quebec. I have second cousins up there who can help us get settled.”
“It was your other cousins in the first place who brought us down here to work in the damn crab factory.” Huey scoffed, releasing a huge cloud of smoke into the air. There wasn’t a hint of a threat or bitterness in his voice anymore; he was simply stating a fact.
“It’s not like it’s been all for nothing,” Duc responded, also stating a fact, though there was some defensiveness behind it. “We’ve made some money.”
“The boat won’t even sell for pennies since it’s been charred to nothing. Besides, I can’t go back to Philly. I can’t… go backward.” Huey touched the cigarette to his lips again. “We’re not welcome anywhere else in this country. We’ve left a trail of destruction in our wake. We either owe people apologies or money, and I don’t have either one to give out now.”
“But what choice do we have? We need to leave,” Duc responded calmly as he rubbed his chin with his free hand, his brow furrowed deep. “I’d rather apologize and face the consequences of our past than face the unpredictability of our future here.”
From a few blocks over came a fleet of feet, running the opposite direction from them. The two men stood up quickly. Instinct told them both to flee, but the commotion was running toward the old abandoned seafood restaurant. Up ahead, they saw shadows lurking, huddling behind the boarded-up restaurant. The former restaurant owner was Chú B?o, who had left town immediately after he witnessed the Klansmen and the American fishermen sail down Clear Lake together, with that hanging Vietnamese man effigy. He had packed up his three daughters, his wife, boarded up his crab shack, and left it to the vultures and to graffiti artists to tag as their playground.
“What’s going on?” Huey whispered, watching more shadows appear in the far distance, heading inside the abandoned crab shack.
“Who cares?” Duc hissed. “Let’s just leave. Whatever it is, it’s not for us to know anymore. We’re leaving town.”
But something about one of the shadows seemed familiar to Huey. The waif build, the long hair, the stomach bulge seemed larger than normal. He could spot her shadow in any rough terrain, at any hour of the night. Evelyn. What was she doing skulking around this place, so late at night?
“I’m just going to go around the side and peek inside,” Huey said, much to Duc’s protests. He hunched his body, and inched around the side of the shack, trying to find a way through the boarded-up windows. There were faint sounds coming from inside—nothing he could make out clearly, but he was comforted knowing the main language was Vietnamese, and there were a lot of Vietnamese voices talking at once. Circling the building, he managed to find a broken window, the crack the size of a donut hole, and he perched on his tiptoes, listening in.
Like a magnet always pointing north, he was immediately drawn toward Evelyn. She wasn’t hard to spot regardless; she was the only woman in a crowd of twenty or so Vietnamese men of varying ages. Despite her delicate frame, she stood tall, her arms instinctively crossed over her growing, pregnant stomach. Though she appeared normal, grief hung heavy all around her; she was drowning in it, lost in its orbit. Huey’s guilt wrapped itself up, tightening its grip around him. The more he tried to alleviate it, the tighter the noose was. He grieved for Evelyn’s future son, who would never know how wonderful his father had been.
Huey scanned the rest of the crowd and spotted Eddie and V?nh next to Evelyn. They both hovered around her protectively, their combined bulk overshadowing her. Huey hadn’t seen them since the night on the boat with Tu?n, but he knew they were avoiding him and Duc. Huey’s guilt was suffocating, observing Eddie and V?nh, standing united with Evelyn in their grief. Though they had all made a pact to never speak the truth of what really happened that night, Huey knew they were forever haunted.
He and Duc were nothing more than cowards.
Huey tried to identify the others. There was Old Man Trung and his son. Tu?n’s father and uncle showed up, despite their grief. Huey recognized more faces, but he knew they wouldn’t recognize him or Duc. It was a community they’d recused themselves from. Huey went from carrying guilt on his shoulders to carrying shame, and he didn’t know which was worse.
As the chatter grew, the crowd parted, creating a narrow pathway for a man to pass. His back turned to Huey as he walked toward the middle and silenced the crowd with raised arms. He turned to reveal himself, and through the small crack in the window, Huey recognized him immediately. Colonel Nam. He’d seen him around town, and the stories about him had become almost messiah-like. He’d been elevated as a leader to the people, a colonel in the South Vietnamese Army. With a taut jaw, gelled, slickedback hair, and a strict posture, Colonel Nam was blunt and to the point. He folded his arms behind him and began his speech.
Huey pressed his ear against the window, attempting to make out bits and pieces.
Don’t lose faith. Fight back. Lawsuit. Lawyer. Mr. Dees.
Believe.
Testify. Testify. Testify.
Huey couldn’t grasp the whole speech, but he saw how intensely the crowd hung on to Colonel Nam’s every word. He knew enough of what was going to happen, all those nights he secretly read up on the laws in this country. He knew they were going to take the Klan to court. But he didn’t need a law degree to know they were fools in their attempt. No American court would ever side with them.
His eyes gravitated toward Evelyn, and he saw that her grief needed hope. She cradled her baby bump even tighter, and she hunched over, her shoulders softly rising and falling. She was sobbing. Eddie and V?nh both put their hands on her shoulders wordlessly. Huey saw the shame in it all.
Huey didn’t just have some schoolboy crush on Evelyn like Duc had; he’d been foolishly in love with the woman ever since he laid eyes on her the first week he arrived. And now the death of her husband, her son’s father, was on his hands. Of all the scamming victims they owed apologies to—from Philadelphia, down to New Orleans, to San Jose—he knew Tu?n’s face would be forever seared into his memory, until his deathbed. He knew he was trapped in Texas, and that he’d never know peace until Tu?n’s body was recovered, until Evelyn and her unborn son were taken care of. The ghost of Tu?n would follow him, like all the soldiers who were never found in the minefields of Vietnam. So many lost bodies and souls—would it ever end?
They said that when the fog settled in for the night in the highlands of Vietnam, ghosts wandered out in the fields, trying to find their way back home. That ?à L?t was the most haunted place of all of them. Every mother was afraid to go there and find their sons searching for home. Seadrift was Huey’s ?à L?t. Huey knew that Tu?n’s ghost would haunt the Gulf forever until Evelyn and her son were taken care of.
When Huey sneaked back to Duc, he wasn’t cognizant of his own voice anymore.
“I’m not leaving,” Huey said defiantly. “You can leave without me.” Duc’s face contorted into something Huey had never seen before. “I’m going to stay and help. And help Evelyn.”
“Help who?” Duc asked incredulously. “What the hell are you going to do? Pick up a gun? You don’t even know how to fire one.”
“I’m going to help them gather testimonies and witnesses for court,” Huey said confidently. “There’s some lawsuit going around to go against the Klan. I want to stay and help.”
Duc burst out laughing. “A lawsuit? We’re not going to win in a goddamn lawsuit here, okay? The laws weren’t made for men like you and me. We’re refugees, not citizens.”
Huey’s face turned red, but he held steady. Facing Duc was harder than facing the barrel of a gun. “Remember what you asked me five years ago when we met? On that shitty fishing boat down in Delacroix Island? You asked me if I could be anything I wanted, what would I be?” Huey asked, his face directly cut in half from the moonlight. “I said I wanted to be respected, and wear a fancy suit one day. I said I wanted to become a lawyer. Do you remember what you told me then?”
Duc’s laugh stopped. He stared at Huey as if he was really seeing him for the first time. “Anh, I was joking around that day. Men like you and me don’t get to become lawyers here. We aren’t the ones who get to wear suits.”
“Do you remember what you told me that day?” Huey pressed on, ignoring Duc.
“I said, pretend you’re a lawyer and act like one. But we aren’t playing pretend here. You’re delusional. This isn’t real. You’re going to get killed if you testify or help with the case.”
“Then at least I’ll die doing something worthy for once,” Huey pleaded. “Will you stay and help, too?”
Duc’s chest rose, and for a split second, Huey held on to hope, as he always did when it came to Duc. Hope that his friend, his brother, his comrade, would stay for him at least. That he also recognized Huey as more than just a friend, but family.
“Anh, you’re a fool,” Duc said slowly. “You’re on your own. I’m leaving town tomorrow. With or without you.” Without another word, he turned on his heel, not giving a second glance back at Huey.