And then the mirror filled up with headlights, too bright and she had to look away. Dim purple afterimages swam before her eyes. She blinked, wondering if it was the cops, hoping just this once that it would be cops, even a Birmingham cop. She reached for the glove compartment, for her license, fingers crossed against the chance they might ask to see the Vega’s registration.
But when she slammed it shut and turned back to the window, the face peering in at her wasn’t a cop, some lantern-jawed good old boy instead. His thick fingertips tapped eagerly at the glass like it’d been their own idea. Niki paused, thought seriously about telling him she’d been driving all night, had only pulled over to rest for a while, that was all. But how long would it be before a highway patrol car happened by, or anyone else bothered to stop? And the thought of setting out on foot in a strange city, this city, in the middle of the night, was even less attractive than the face at the window. She checked to be sure that her door was locked, then rolled the window down a cautious crack, barely enough to talk through.
“You havin’ some car trouble?” he asked, cold air and his breath, the sick-sweet reek of chewing tobacco or snuff, leaking in through the crack.
“Uh, yeah. I’m afraid I am.”
“Well, I’ll be glad to take a look at her, if you want.”
The man looked like all the Boo Radleys of the world rolled into one jug-eared, unshaven package. It still isn’t too late, familiar, worried voice that sounded like her mother, whispering inside her head, It’s not too late to tell him that someone’s already gone for help, that the police…
“Sure. Thanks,” she said and smiled, a nervous smile that she hoped looked genuine.
He smiled back, dirty row of crooked teeth, then nodded and tugged at the brim of the grease-stained cap he was wearing.
“No problem, ma’am,” he said.
“I think maybe I let the oil get too low and it overheated.”
“That’d do it.” He pulled a flashlight from the back pocket of his work pants and stepped around to the front of the Vega, fiddled beneath the grille for a moment, hands out of sight, until the hood popped up and all she could see was slick black metal and the streetlights overhead, the windshield reflected in the paint.
You should be home, the mother voice said. It said that a lot. You should come home, Nicolan. Home, where it’s safe.
The man stepped back into view, the Vega’s dipstick in one hand and the flashlight in his other, leaned in close to the window and held the stick up for her.
“See that, how the oil looks all brown and milky?”
The oil clinging to the stick was the color of café au lait or almonds. Niki nodded.
“That means you got water in your oil. Prob’ly means you blew a head gasket.”
Vague, sinking sensation in her stomach, bad news cranking up the gravity a notch or two, and she knew that very soon The Voice in her head would begin its carefully rehearsed I-told-you-so litany.
“That’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” and he shrugged and switched the flashlight off, spat at the ground. “It’s pretty bad. Wouldn’t try to start her up again, if I was you.”
“Fuck,” Niki muttered. Behind her eyes, The Voice was busy asking why she hadn’t considered this sort of thing before she’d chucked her old life like last week’s fish heads. Why she never thought any further ahead these days than the end of her nose.
“Look,” she said. “I’d really appreciate it if you’d call a wrecker for me when you get to a phone.”
“No problem,” he said again, staring down at the place where he’d spit. “But I’d be glad to give you a ride. There’s a garage just off the highway over there,” and he motioned toward the next exit, maybe a hundred yards ahead. “Friend of mine’s a mechanic there, and they got a truck goes out twenty-four hours.”
The Voice balked at the notion of her going anywhere with this guy. Niki fingered the little can of pepper spray attached to her key chain; a ride with Boo seemed like a sure way to wind up on next week’s America ’s Most Wanted or Unsolved Mysteries.
“’Course, they won’t be nobody to have a look at your car ’til in the mornin’. But I guess you already figured that out.”
“Yeah,” she said, pressed the seat-belt release with her thumb and slipped the keys from the ignition. The Voice was just a tired echo, mental tatters. It was all that remained of the old Niki Ky, the Niki Ky that had spent three years table dancing for tips in New Orleans’ seedier strip clubs, lying about her age and waiting for some kind of life to find her.
She reached between the bucket seats and grabbed the big canvas gym bag nestled on the floorboard, melon-pink canvas stuffed and bulging at the seams. Anything she had worth stealing was in there, along with plenty of other stuff that wasn’t.
“You got a deal,” she said, rolling up the window, opening the door and locking it behind her.
Outside the car, the cold had teeth, stinging wind that seemed unseasonably bitter. Niki saw the Ford pickup pulled in close behind the Vega, its front bumper tied on crooked with baling wire and a large set of deer antlers mounted for a hood ornament. She set the gym bag at her feet while she fumbled with the snaps on the baggy old army jacket.
When she was done, she held out her hand.
“I’m Niki Ky,” she said.
He looked at Niki’s hand warily, as if he’d been offered a suspicious cut of meat or some strange tool he didn’t know how to use.
“You Chinese?”
“Vietnamese,” Niki replied patiently, this old routine like opening lines from vaudeville; she was starting to shiver.
“ Vietnam, huh? My daddy, couple of my uncles, all fought in that war. One of my uncles got killed over there.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and of course it was a stupid thing to say, but the wind was cutting into her, razor blades and Novocain, and she was still holding her hand out to him, even though her fingertips were going numb.
“Oh, that’s all right. You pro’bly wasn’t even born yet, and they sent the body home.”
Niki’s teeth had begun to chatter, clicking in her mouth like tiny porcelain castanets. She looked longingly toward the waiting truck and tried to ignore the gun rack mounted in the cab’s rear window, the two rifles resting there.
“My name’s Wendel. Wendel Sayer. Pleased to meet you, Niki Ky. ” And Wendel smiled again, finally shook her hand before pointing at the truck. “That’s my truck,” he said.
“Wendel,” she said, “I’m freezing my ass off.”
“Oh,” and he released her well-shaken hand, which she immediately jammed deep into one of the jacket’s spacious pockets. “Well, then let’s go find you that tow truck.”
Before she followed Wendel to the truck, Niki double-checked the door, making certain that she’d locked it. The car was one of the few tangible links back to her old life, and lately, things had had a way of slipping away from her when she wasn’t looking.
2.
Niki had been born two years after the fall of Saigon, twenty-three years after Eisenhower had agreed to fund and train South Vietnamese soldiers to fight the communists. Her parents were among the lucky few, the handful of South Vietnamese evacuated along with American citizens. John and Nancy Ky had become Americans and immigrated to New Orleans, traded in tradition and their Vietnamese names, the horrors of their lives in Tayninh and Saigon for citizenship and a small tobacco shop on Magazine Street. They had named their only child Nicolan Jeane, would have named the son her father had wished for Nicolas. Niki’s birth had left her mother bedridden for more than a month, and the doctors had warned that another pregnancy would very likely kill her.
Neither of Niki’s parents had ever made a habit of talking about their lives before New Orleans, had kept themselves apart from the city’s tight-knit Vietnamese community. Always seemed to struggle to answer any questions Niki asked about their lives before America in as few words as possible, as if bad memories, bad times, had ears and could be summoned like demons. There had been letters, exotic stamps and picture postcards from halfway around the world, messages from faceless relatives written in the mysterious, beautiful alphabet that she had never learned to read. Her mother had kept these someplace secret, or maybe she’d just thrown them away. Niki had treasured her rare glimpses of this correspondence, would sometimes hold an envelope to her nose and lips, hoping for some whiff or faint taste of a world that must have been so much more marvelous than their boxy white and avocado-green house in the Metairie suburbs.