Sightseeing Read online

  That afternoon, just as Dong got halfway down the diving board, Priscilla the Cambodian appeared poolside out of nowhere. “Wheeeeee!” she squealed like a happy little succubus. Dong hesitated, turned to look at Priscilla, lost crucial velocity, and tumbled off the edge of the diving board. It made a bad sound. It sounded like a dog getting hit by a car because even with all the bike’s clanging and screeching I could still hear Dong yelp when he hit the pool’s hard bottom. Priscilla pointed and laughed, and that’s when I glimpsed her gold fangs glinting for the very first time.

  “Refugee fuckass,” Dong muttered, getting up off the mildewed tiles. “What do you think you’re doing?” He collected his bike, teetered on his feet. But Priscilla the Cambodian just laughed and laughed some more. “Hey,” I said, walking down toward Dong in the deep end. “The pool’s ours. Get out of here.” She looked at me curiously. She was younger than us. She wore an old Kasikon Bank T-shirt that came down to her knees. Short black hair sprouted in matted tufts all over her head. And she had that mouthful of gold.

  She stopped laughing, frowned, pointed an accusing finger at us both. “Leave my mother alone,” she said sternly in Thai, her tiny voice echoing around the pool. “No more rocks.” Dong and I exchanged glances. We didn’t know she could speak Thai. We’d seen her around the housing development with the other Cambodians, but they’d always spoken to each other in that gibberish.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dong said, rubbing his head with the heel of his palm.

  “Don’t lie,” she answered. I glimpsed her teeth again. I thought about pirates. “I’ll kill you next time. I’m not kidding, guys.”

  “Okay,” Dong said, shrugging, getting on his bike. He started riding in large swooping circles, the chain creaking noisily, the wheels singing beneath him. “Sure. Whatever, girlie.” She stared at us impassively, watched Dong gliding along the bottom of the pool. “You speak pretty good Thai,” I said after a while. “What’s your name?”

  Dong shot me an incredulous look from his bike.

  “Priscilla,” she said almost sheepishly, fingering the hem of her T-shirt.

  “Some name for a refugee,” I replied, laughing. “That’s not a Cambodian name. That’s a farang name.”

  She opened her mouth as if she might explain. But then she turned around and started walking away. “Just don’t do it again,” she said as she went through the unpainted gate. “No more rocks. My mama doesn’t like it.”

  She’d been gone for all of ten minutes when Dong and I climbed up the pool ladder, fished the bike out, and started making our way toward the railroad tracks.

  “Did you see her teeth?”

  “Yeah,” Dong said. “She’s a freak.”

  A thin strand of smoke curled out of Priscilla’s shack. Somebody was cooking inside. We stood on the railroad ties, grabbed a few choice rocks, felt their cold, lovely heft in our hands. “Bombs away,” Dong said, winking.

  The first rock elicited no response. But as soon as the second one rang the corrugated roof, Priscilla emerged from the house like an angry little boar, fists at her sides, nostrils flared, bushwhacking her way through the knoll separating the train tracks from the Cambodians’ shanty. I saw her contorted face, started laughing, started sprinting. But halfway back to the road, I noticed Dong wasn’t running beside me.

  I turned around. That tiny Cambodian girl had Dong pinned facedown to the railroad ties. She sat on his back while he bucked and thrashed beneath her like a rodeo horse. She yelled at him, pummeled the back of his head repeatedly with her hands. I thought about leaving him there. But then I remembered that the girl had said she was going to kill us, and I suddenly didn’t know how serious Cambodians were when they said something like that, even if the Cambodian was just a little girl. She could’ve been Khmer Rouge—a term Mother and Father always mentioned in stern voices when they complained about the refugees—although I only understood at the time that Khmer Rouge was a bad thing like cancer was a bad thing. Khmer Rouge probably made you bald and pale and impossibly skinny, and Khmer Rouge probably made you cough up vile gray-green globs of shit like Uncle Sutichai when we visited him at the hospital every Sunday. If that little girl had Khmer Rouge, I certainly didn’t want Dong to get it too.

  Dong looked at me helplessly when I arrived. Priscilla had both his arms pinned to the earth with her feet. “Dude,” he pleaded. “Do something.”

  “Say you’re sorry!” Priscilla screamed. Dong grunted, struggled some more in vain. She didn’t notice I was there. “Say you’re sorry!” she screamed again, hitting Dong’s head a few more times, the sound flat and dull.

  I touched her shoulder. Priscilla turned around and hit me so quick in the face that I fell back stunned. She got off Dong, leapt toward me like a little panther. She bared her golden teeth and for a second I was afraid she might bite me. But she just started hitting my head with her palms. I raised my arms for protection, her blows short and stinging, but I also found myself laughing the whole time, taken aback by the intensity of the little girl’s rage.

  “Apologize!” she screamed again and again and again.

  “Okay, okay,” I managed to say after a while. “Sorry. You win. Mercy already.”

  “God, girlie,” Dong said, getting up, wiping the dirt from his pants with both hands. “Give peace a chance.”

  She stopped. She looked at us both. “I told you I’d kill you,” she said proudly, crossing her arms. And then she reached out and punched Dong in the shoulder. “Fuck,” Dong said, flinching. “All right already. You know, it’s a good thing you’re a girl because—”

  “You didn’t say sorry,” she interrupted him sternly. Dong rubbed his shoulder with a hand. She raised her fists again.

  “Okay,” he grunted. “Sorry. Happy now?”

  “No,” she said. “Now I want you to say sorry to my mama.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “Fuck no,” said Dong, shaking his head, but Priscilla had already yelled something in Cambodian toward the shack and her mother was already walking slowly across the knoll, wiping her hands on a greasy apron.

  Priscilla’s mother was the shortest woman I’d ever seen, barely a head taller than us, with a face as flat as an omelet, wide black unreflective eyes, and a man’s broad shoulders. Her teeth weren’t gold like her daughter’s. They were just slightly crooked, a bit yellow, boring and regular. Priscilla said something else to her in Cambodian. Her mother nodded, scowling at us silently the whole time. “Say you’re sorry,” Priscilla said in Thai.

  Dong looked at me. I looked at Dong.

  “Do it,” she said, her face creasing into a severe frown. “Or I’ll beat you again.”

  “Sorry,” we finally said in unison, staring at each other’s feet. Priscilla’s mother kept on scowling at us. I thought she’d start barking in Cambodian. I thought we might even discover what ungodly thing she’d meant to do with that rusted shovel. She’d probably bury us alive, I thought. I got ready to run. But instead Priscilla’s mother just reached out and slapped us lightly on the back of our heads. And then, to our surprise, she smiled at us broadly—a genuine smile—before saying something to Priscilla. And then she walked back down to the shack.

  Priscilla eyed us curiously, picked at her golden teeth with a pinky nail, as if deciding what to do with us.

  “Can we go now?” Dong asked.

  “If you want,” Priscilla said, shrugging. “Unless you guys want something to eat.”

  That was the beginning of a nice thing. We never threw rocks at her house again. Although Dong continued to insist that we hadn’t fought back because Priscilla was just a little girl, I think we both knew there was little we could’ve done that afternoon to beat back her angry advances. She was so pissed off it was the purest expression of fury I’d ever witnessed aside from the night Mother took a broomstick to a gigantic rat that had been raiding our trash.

  So we didn’t mind when Priscilla showed up at the pool the nex
t morning. We gladly took her in. The three of us would horse around aimlessly down there, wasting those bright summer days. That’s when Priscilla told us about her father and her teeth. That’s when Dong and I would look into her mouth and tell her she was rich.

  We initiated Priscilla to the simple pleasures of a normal, non-refugee-camp summer. We introduced her to ice cream. We bought a kite and flew it from the bottom of the pool. We took her to a movie at the cheap theater in Onnut—a horror movie about some witch living by a canal—and Priscilla gripped me so hard during the frightening parts that I discovered tiny bruises on my forearms when we got out. We even taught her how to ride a bike. The first time she got going on her own, zoomed down the slope to the deep end, she screamed so loud you could almost feel the pool’s porcelain walls vibrate.

  For our part, Dong and I got better with the bike. We managed to pop a couple of wheelies, though the diving board trick was still far out of reach. “You guys are so stupid,” Priscilla would say, watching us work up the courage to try again.

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.” But then she’d laugh so hard after we fell that it was almost worth risking our necks just to hear her guffaw.

  When it got too hot we’d go to Priscilla’s shack. Her mother cleaned houses in the nicer development down the road from ours—where the Thicknecks frolicked in their Olympic-sized community pool—but on days off Priscilla’s mother would often make sticky rice for us. There was never more than that, no fish or pork or anything, but the rice felt good and substantial to have in the stomach. Priscilla’s mother watched us eat impassively and the three of us would teach her a few Thai phrases. Dong and I taught her how to swear in Thai. We’d laugh because there was nothing funnier than hearing a flat-faced Cambodian refugee woman saying “Dickwad” and “Fuckface” and “Hairy beaver.”

  That’s when we learned about Priscilla’s name. She was named after Elvis Presley’s wife. One of the few possessions her mother brought with her was an LP showing Elvis’s fat farang mug framed by those thick bushy chops. The record sat on top of a milk crate, propped against the dirty tin wall like a centerpiece to a shrine, and although Priscilla said she’d never heard the record—they didn’t own a player—her mother had done renditions during nights at the camps to get her to sleep. Dong and I looked at the LP cover and said we didn’t understand how anybody could think the guy was handsome. If he grew up in Bangkok he wouldn’t be king of anything. The Thicknecks would probably call him names. He’d be no better than the rest of us plebes. “Look at the guy,” we said. “He’s wearing a cape.”

  Aside from the Elvis record, there was also a small picture of Priscilla’s father taped above the moth-eaten pallet she shared with her mother every night. In the picture, Priscilla’s father stood before a massive concrete building wearing light green hospital scrubs. He had large, clunky glasses, stared intently at something outside the frame. “Now that guy there,” we told Priscilla. “That guy’s handsome. Elvis is puke compared to that guy.” Priscilla believed her father was still alive. We weren’t about to suggest otherwise.

  The Cambodian shanty grew just as Father predicted. They really did move in packs. There were four, then six, then eight shacks and near the end of the summer there must have been thirty Cambodians living across the railroad tracks bordering our housing development. Their tiny houses leaned haphazardly against one another; from afar their shanty looked like a single delicate structure made of crinkled tin cards. Like Priscilla and her mother, they were mostly women and children, though a few dark, gaunt men appeared as well. The Cambodians never seemed to say much to each other, and when they did they spoke in hushed tones, as if being refugees also meant being quiet. They might turn blue with laughter or gesticulate wildly or get angry at each other, but they always seemed to do so at half the normal human volume. During the evenings they chatted, kicked around a takraw ball, sewed blankets and pillows, tended to the herb garden they’d started planting in the knoll. Dong and I never spoke to any of them, but we thought it was nice the way they nodded or waved or smiled when we came by on our bikes.

  Every morning a white pickup truck would arrive to take some of the Cambodians to work at a road construction site. They’d pile in back, bunched together so close there wasn’t any room to sit. Once, Dong and I got up early enough to see this, and there was something about the faces of those Cambodians going to work that nearly broke our hearts in half. Their quiet anxious expressions said they weren’t sure they were coming back. They looked at their dilapidated little world by the railroad tracks as if for the very last time. The truck would drop them off in the early evening and they would all be there, of course—nothing to worry about at all—and it was almost understandable to me how they could look relieved to be back at such shitty little shacks. Surviving each day seemed a victory and a wonder to them.

  Two of Priscilla’s teeth came out that summer. The first was a lateral incisor, close to her front teeth. She cried all day when she discovered it loosening from her gums. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, a finger holding the tooth in place. By that time Dong and I were already veterans of the ordeal. We told her not to worry. We told her it was natural. “I don’t care if it’s natural,” she said, and then she cried and cried some more. We spent most of the morning consoling her. We told her to imagine the things she and her mother would be able to buy with the gold. A television. A record player. A refrigerator. But she said she didn’t want anything. “It’s my tooth,” she said. “It’s mine.” Then I told her it had probably been her father’s plan all along—he probably thought Priscilla and her mother would need the gold to find their way home to him—and the idea seemed to console her momentarily.

  A week later, the tooth came out at last. We were sharing a bag of fishballs at the pool when Priscilla suddenly spat the tooth into her hand. We stared for a while at that ingot sitting in a small pool of spittle and blood and masticated fish, then Priscilla wiped it off and passed it around. The tooth didn’t seem so brilliant outside of her mouth. It just looked like a shiny little pebble, impossibly light in my hand. We took the tooth back to Priscilla’s mother and she put it away in a teakwood box next to Elvis Presley’s portrait.

  The housing development’s decline became painfully visible, just as my parents had predicted. For the first time the development company didn’t bother to fill the gaping potholes created by the wet-season floods. There were so many craters in the roads Mother said she was beginning to think we lived on the moon. She said, “Dear God, I really don’t care about the health club or the pool or the community garden anymore, I just want to ride my bike to the bus stop without breaking my goddamn neck.”

  More rats started appearing as well. There were so many of them by the end of the summer that Mother could not have prevented them from getting to our trash even at her angriest. I watched in horror one evening as a mangy, mean-looking stray nosed a sewer grate outside our house only to scurry away frightened when three rats came lumbering out to greet her. “It’s an invasion out there,” Mother said. “It’s a goddamn rat apocalypse.” Father set poisoned rat-paper in the outdoor kitchen every other night. In the morning, there’d always be two or three rats, large as small kittens, squealing and moaning, struggling against the glutinous surface like demonic little dinosaurs dying in some tar pit.

  Dong said rats were super-horny. He’d seen some documentary about it on television. One rat, he said, can make up to fifteen thousand little rats in a single year. Priscilla laughed and said this was nothing. “This is easy,” she said. She told us that at one of the camps things got so bad people went to sleep hugging a stick just in case.

  We discovered a rat in the pool one day. It had fallen in and couldn’t find a way out. We stood at the edge of the pool staring at the hideous red-eyed thing prancing around. We didn’t know what to do. So we wandered aimlessly for the rest of the morning. Dong seemed so upset about the rat I thought he’d start crying. But when we went back
later that afternoon it was gone. We never saw a rat in there again. But the pool was different for us after that.

  Father blamed the rats on the refugees. He said they always brought vermin with them. “It’s no wonder about the rats,” he said one night when some of the men in the development came over for drinks. “Those people shit and piss wherever they please. You can’t have people shitting and pissing wherever they please and not expect to have rats.”

  The men nodded along, passed around a flask of rye. Dong’s father was there as well. I brought over a tray full of Heinekens and a pail of fresh ice for the men while Mother sat in the kitchen getting angry at the checkbook.

  “They’re probably raising them,” one of the men said. “Cambodians probably think rats are a delicacy.”

  “Cambodians,” somebody else scoffed. “They’re the real rats, if you ask me.”

  I poured the men their beer, emptied the ashtray into a plastic bag. Father put his hand on my shoulder. “This is my boy,” Father said, shaking my shoulder vigorously. “This here’s our future. This is who we’re fighting for.”

  The men nodded drunkenly along. A chill passed through my body right then. I wanted to tell the men that the refugees had built a proper outhouse hidden discreetly behind a hedge. I wanted to tell them that they didn’t shit and piss indiscriminately like Father had said. I wanted to tell them about Priscilla and her mother. But I didn’t think the men would appreciate these revelations.

  I woke up late that night to the sound of their high, excited voices. I got out of bed and watched them standing around my father in the yard, nodding their heads in unison. Somebody arrived with a pickup truck and the men climbed in, their deep, drunken voices murmuring up to my window. They left their empty bottles on the straw mat in our yard, and for some reason I thought about how Mother and I would have to pick up the mess in the morning. The truck puttered down the street, the men chanting now, as if working up the courage to do something valiant. I walked down the stairs with my heart in my mouth. I threw on my rubber slippers, started running into the night, down the street and out toward the railroad tracks.