“Don’t come in, Grandad. He wants to kill you.”
“Dang, did you hear me? You let Lisa go and I’ll come in. I have a gun now but I’ll drop it if you agree.”
His first bullet ripped through the glass and screening of the front door.
I pitched left, rolling on the ground to escape the second and third shots.
Lisa yelled at Dang to stop firing, her words echoing inside the trailer.
Prairie silence again; a hawk gliding down the sunbeams.
I scanned the trailer, looking for some way to get closer without getting shot. There wasn’t enough room to hide next to the three stairs; nor behind the two silver propane tanks; nor even around the corner. The bedroom window was too high to peek in comfortably.
“He’s picking up his rifle, Grandad!” Lisa called.
Two more shots, these more explosive and taking larger chunks of the front door, burst into the afternoon air. I rolled away from them as best I could.
“Grandad, watch out!”
And then a cry came, one so shrill and aggrieved I wasn’t sure what it was at first, and then the front door was thrown open and there was Dang, rifle fire coming in bursts as he came out on the front steps, shooting directly at me.
This time I rolled to the right. He was still sobbing out words in Vietnamese and these had the power to mesmerize me. They spoke exactly of how deep his grief ran.
Another burst of rifle fire, Dang standing on the steps of the trailer and having an easy time finding me with his rifle.
There was a long and curious delay before my brain realized that my chest had been wounded. It was as if all time stopped for a long moment, the universe holding its breath; and then came blood and raging blinding pain. Then I felt a bone in my arm crack as a bullet smashed into it.
Lisa screamed again. “Grandad!”
As I lay there, another bullet taking my left leg, I realized I had only moments to do what I needed to. Dang was coming down from the steps, moving in to kill me. I raised the .38 and fired.
The explosion was instant and could probably be heard for miles. I’d been forced to shoot at him at an angle. The bullet had missed and torn into one of the propane tanks. The entire trailer had vanished inside tumbling gritty black smoke and fire at least three different shades of red and yellow. The air reeked of propane and the burning trailer.
I called out for Lisa but I knew I could never get to my feet to help her. I was losing consciousness too fast.
And then Dang was standing over me, rifle pointed directly down at my head.
I knew I didn’t have long. “Save her, Dang. She’s innocent just the way your sister was. Save her, please. I’m begging you.”
The darkness was swift and cold and black, and the sounds of Lisa screaming and fire roaring faded, faded.
The room was small and white and held but one bed and it was mine.
Lisa and Emmy and Nick stood on the left side of the bed while Mai stood on the right.
“I guess I’ll have to do some of your chores for a while, Grandad.”
“I guess you will, hon.”
“That means driving the tractor.”
I looked at Emmy, who said, “We’ll hire a couple of hands, sweetheart. No tractor for you until Grandad gets back.”
Nick looked at his watch. “How about if I take these two beautiful ladies downstairs for some lunch? This is one of the few hospitals that actually serves good food.”
But it wasn’t just lunch he was suggesting. He wanted to give Mai a chance to speak with me alone.
Lisa and Emmy kissed me then went downstairs with Nick.
I was already developing stiffness from being in bed so long. After being operated on, I’d slept through the night and into this morning.
Mai leaned over and took my hand. “I’m glad you’re all right, Mr. Wilson.”
“I’m sorry, Mai. How things turned out.”
“In the end, he was honorable man.”
“He certainly was, Mai. He certainly was.”
After I’d passed out, Dang had rushed back into the trailer and rescued Lisa, who had been remarkably unscathed.
Then Dang had run back inside, knowing he would die in the smoke and the flames.
“Tomorrow would have been our little sister’s birthday,” Mai said, “I do not think he wanted to face that.”
She cried for a long time cradled in my good left arm, my right being in a sling like hers.
“He was not a bad man.”
“No, he wasn’t, Mai. He was a good man.”
“I am sorry for your grief.”
“And I’m sorry for yours.”
She smiled tearily. “Seasons of the heart, Mr. Wilson. Perhaps the season will change now.”
“Perhaps they will,” I said, and watched her as she leaned over to kiss me on the forehead.
As she was leaving, I pointed to my arm sling and then to hers. “Twins,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps we are, Robert.”
En Famille
By the time I was eight years old, I’d fallen disconsolately in love with any number of little girls who had absolutely no interest in me. These were little girls I’d met in all the usual places, school, playground, neighborhood.
Only the girl I met at the racetrack took any interest in me. Her name was Wendy and, like me, she was brought to the track three or four times a week by her father, after school in the autumn months, during working hours in the summer.
Ours was one of those impossibly romantic relationships that only a young boy can have (all those nights of kissing pillows while pretending it was her — this accompanied by one of those swelling romantic songs you hear in movies with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant — how vulnerable and true and beautiful she always was in my mind’s perfect eye). I first saw her the spring of my tenth year, and not until I was fifteen did we even say hello to each other, even though we saw each other at least three times a week. But she was always with me, this girl I thought about constantly, and dreamed of nightly, the melancholy little blonde with the slow sad blue eyes and the quick sad smile.
I knew all about the sadness I saw in her. It was my sadness, too. Our fathers brought us to the track in order to make their gambling more palatable to our mothers. How much of a vice could it be if you took the little one along? The money lost at the track meant rent going unpaid, grocery store credit cut off, the telephone frequently disconnected. It also meant arguing. No matter how deeply I hid in the closet, no matter how many pillows I put over my head, I could still hear them shrieking at each other. Sometimes he hit her. Once he even pushed her down the stairs and she broke her leg. Despite all this, I wanted them to stay together. I was terrified they would split up. I loved them both beyond imagining. Don’t ask me why I loved him so much. I have no idea.
The day we first spoke, the little girl and I, that warm May afternoon in my fifteenth year, a black eye spoiled her very pretty, very pale little face. So he’d finally gotten around to hitting her. My father had gotten around to hitting me years ago. They got so frustrated over their gambling, their inability to stop their gambling, that they grabbed the first person they found and visited all their despair on him.
She was coming up from the seats in the bottom tier where she and her father always sat. I saw her and stepped out into the aisle.
“Hi,” I said after more than six years of us watching each other from afar.
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry about your eye.”
“He was pretty drunk. He doesn’t usually get violent. But it seems to be getting worse lately.” She looked back at her seats. Her father was glaring at us. “I’d better hurry. He wants me to get him a hot dog.”
“I’d like to see you sometime.”
She smiled, sad and sweet with her black eye. “Yeah, me, too.”