Long was only planning on bringing one bag with him to Saigon in the morning and knew he didn’t need much time to pack. So after helping his mother bundle up her unsold lychees at the market and washing their sticky juices from his arms, he decided to head straight to Fat Uncle’s—the quán nhậu at the edge of town. As he approached the restaurant he saw Binh’s battered Honda Super Cub parked at a crooked angle next to Tan’s motorbike. This indicated that the two had arrived separately, which relieved Long, but also meant that Binh had shown up already drunk, which worried him anew. Since dropping out of school to work full-time in her family’s cashew orchard, Binh had found herself with a surplus of long, solitary hours to spend in the trees with her uncle’s old army canteen, which she had appropriated and kept filled with her own mixture of rice wine and sugarcane pulp.
She had been furious when Long told her he would be going to a university in Saigon instead of attending one in Dak Lak or Gia Lai or even Lam Dong. He would never admit it, but part of the reason that Long had ended up taking the scholarship in the city was so that he could see what Binh’s reaction would be. When Tan had left for the police academy two years earlier, it had briefly been the happiest time in Long’s life. He had been so sure that without his brother, he and Binh would become closer. That she would realize that she and Long had never really needed him. Instead, she had left high school a month into their new semester. She and Long only really saw each other when he came over with books for her to borrow or if she wanted a drinking buddy. Most of the time, she didn’t.
So her reaction at his leaving had filled him with joy. Long would not have been able to bear it if she had been indifferent. Her anger meant everything to him. It felt almost life-sustaining. She refused to speak to him. For three weeks, whenever he came by the orchard with apology books for her, she disappeared into the high branches where he could not follow. His good soccer shoes mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night, and a few days later he noticed canvas scraps and pieces of undigested rubber in the dung of his neighbor’s pigs when he walked past the pen. But eventually she seemed to make peace with Long’s departure. She was the one who had insisted on holding the going-away party tonight at Fat Uncle’s.
Binh spotted him as he walked in and waved him over from the table in the back corner that she preferred. She hadn’t changed out of her dirty work coveralls, and there was a tiny twig in her ponytail. Tan was seated across from her, looking sallow and dyspeptic in his green uniform—he had driven up to Ia Kare two days ago and would be taking Long back to Saigon with him in the morning, as Long had no motorbike of his own, and his motion sickness ruled out the bus.
“Look who else is here,” Binh hissed to Long as he slid into the plastic chair next to her.
At first Long thought she was referring to the fact that there were two other women in Fat Uncle’s tonight, which was an unusual occurrence. They were sharing a sarsaparilla soda and making uncomfortable conversation with each other while the boyfriends they were accompanying took shots of rice wine and ignored them.
But then Long realized that Binh was talking about Old Ma, the richest man in Ia Kare and second richest in the Ea Sup district, who was sitting a few tables away with a small group of workers from his pepper fields. Two crates of beer were stacked beside their table, and the empty bottles were lined up on the floor to make room for all of their plates of food. They were eating frog legs cooked in so much chili that Long’s nostrils itched from across the room, rectangular cakes of fermented pork parceled up in banana leaves, and the roasted bones of something that might have been rabbit. Long tried to add up in his head how expensive it all must have been but wasn’t exactly sure how much a crate of Saigon Red cost, because he had never bothered to look at the beer prices on the back of the menu, knowing he could not afford it. As usual, tonight Binh had ordered them Fat Uncle’s musty home-brewed rice wine, steeped with roots that turned it the color of fish sauce and gave it a medicinal aftertaste. It was so cheap that it came served in old plastic water bottles with the labels scrubbed off. Tan, who disliked alcohol, was sipping from a carton of corn-flavored milk, his favorite drink and the beverage of choice for young children with stomachaches. Long saw that Tan had also already polished off half of their plate of fried rice, so he quickly spooned out a small bowlful for Binh and another for himself before it could all vanish.
“Not so fast,” said Binh. “Drinks first! And as punishment for being late you have to do three.” She grabbed Tan’s untouched glass, lined it up next to hers and Long’s, then poured out the shots and slid them over, only sloshing a little of the liquor onto the table in the process. Long downed them in rapid succession, trying not to breathe between glasses in order to delay the burning. He wasn’t a very good drinker, but he did it for Binh. It was something the two of them shared that she and Tan did not.
She had turned her attention back to the Ma table. “Look at how uncomfortable they are. They don’t want to nhậu with their boss—it’s so awkward. They can’t get too drunk, but they can’t stay too sober either, or they’ll offend him. They can’t curse, they can’t spit their bones out onto the floor…”
“Can’t eat with their fingers,” added Long, watching as one of the farmhands struggled to maintain his chopstick grip on a chili-slick frog leg. Another was making an ostentatious show of opening a new beer and pouring it into Mr. Ma’s glass. The backs of his hands and neck were tanned to a deep brown shade nearly identical to that of the glass bottle.
Binh cackled under her breath. “I know they’re getting a free dinner, but I feel sorry for them. All that the poor bastards want is to get drunk at home, in their underwear, in peace.”
Tan was feeling left out, because his back was to the group of pepper farmers and he couldn’t turn around to look at them without being too obvious. He took a gulp of his corn milk and wiped his mouth with his hand. “You’re just jealous,” he said to Binh.
Binh cocked her head dangerously. “What do you mean by that, Kitten?”
“It’s more than etiquette,” said Tan. “It’s important. It’s ritual. So they have to chew with their mouths closed for one night. So what? They know that it’s what you do. It’s not really about table manners, it’s about respect. Order. Tradition. It’s a man thing. You can’t understand it because you’re a girl, and so you’re jealous.” He took another smug sip of milk.
“Or maybe I actually understand it better than you, because I know how to drink and you can’t hold your liquor,” said Binh, knocking back another glass with a grin.
“He sort of creeps me out,” Long said absently, his eyes still fixed on the craggy profile of Old Ma. “I know the stories about his daughter probably aren’t true, but I always get…shivery if I see him around town.”
“I heard a new one about her,” said Binh, dropping her voice, and Long instantly regretted bringing up the subject and quickly tried to think of another one to change it to.
“No.” Tan shook his head emphatically. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t care.”
Binh ignored him. “It’s a good one. When the guy from the processing plant in Ea Drang came to pick up some bags from us we started talking. He has a cousin here whose son was at school around the same time as the Ma girl, but a few years younger. The kid didn’t know her all that well, but he remembered when she went missing—he was eleven then.”
“Then I’m sure he’s very reliable,” Tan muttered under his breath.
“He didn’t see her again for two more years,” continued Binh. “Until the midautumn festival they hold at the school. He said that he was in the back, trying to climb a fig tree to get a better view of the lantern parade, but he slipped down the trunk and then stumbled backward into the girl by accident. She was by herself—her parents had probably taken her out to watch the parade, and she must have gotten separated from them in the crowd. The boy said that he turned to her and apologized, and she just smiled at him. He didn’t recognize her yet, but she made him uneasy, because she was scary thin and her clothes were fancy, but her hair was dirty, and her smile kept moving around her face.”
Binh dropped her voice down to a whisper. “She said to him, ‘Don’t you remember me? I’m the girl who was lost. They thought that they had saved me, but they found me too late.’ Then she brought her face right up to his, and she said: ‘Because the many-headed serpent had changed me already.’ The Ma girl smiled, and then…” Binh suddenly slammed her hands down. The keys to her motorbike jangled on the table and one of the empty shot glasses toppled over. “And then she flicked her tongue out of her mouth and it was forked!” Long jumped in his chair; Tan rolled his eyes. “And skinny and black and ten inches long! She tickled the tip of his nose with the pointy ends of it!” Binh made a V with the middle and index fingers of one hand and waggled them in Tan’s face to demonstrate. “And then she just slurped the tongue back up into her mouth, like a big noodle. He ran away. Was too terrified to tell anyone about it for years.”
“Ugh,” said Long, shuddering.
“I’m sure your cashew man from Ea Drang was glad that he impressed you with his little story,” smirked Tan. “Did he ask you for a quickie behind the pigpen afterward? Did you let him?”
“Oh, you’re disgusting,” said Binh.
“You’re disgusting—look how dirty your nails are,” said Tan, reaching across the table for her fingers and then holding them up for inspection. “How often are you bathing?”
“Another drink,” Long said quickly, interrupting them. He poured out a glass for Binh and pushed it into the hand that Tan was touching.
“How many heads?” Binh pondered aloud, bringing the glass to her lips. “How many heads does it take to make a many-headed serpent? Two? Three? Twelve?”
“Oh my god, he’s looking right at us!” hissed Long under his breath. “He must have heard you!”
Old Ma had turned all the way around in his chair and was staring at the trio in the corner. The workers at his table were all following suit. Tan, with his back safely to them, shrugged and reached his spoon out for more fried rice, while Long froze in place.
But Binh lifted her hand and gave Old Ma a debonair wave. “Respect,” she said, flicking her gaze over to Tan. “Order. Tradition. Right? So, let’s go!” She rose to her feet and slapped the back of Long’s chair. He tried to shake his head no while making as little movement as possible, knowing that the other table was watching him, but finally stood up too. “Well, Kitten? Are you coming?” Binh picked up the bottle of rice wine in one hand and her keys in the other and then strode off across the restaurant, Long following nervously behind. Tan finished chewing before he joined them.
“Uncle!” Binh greeted Old Ma, slathering the politesse on thick enough to conceal her contempt. “It would be an honor to invite you to share a drink with us.”
Old Ma sized Binh up, taking in the twig in her hair and the red mud on the soles of her boots but also the swell of her breasts in her coveralls. “Do I know your parents?” he asked. The deep wrinkles on his face looked like cracks in a dry rice paddy. Long had expected his voice to be sonorous and grand, like what a buffalo would sound like if it could speak. Instead it was reedy and a little hoarse.
“I don’t even know my parents,” laughed Binh. “I think they’re both dead. I was adopted by my aunt and uncle when I was a baby.”
“But these are Duc Phan’s boys,” said Old Ma, looking past her at Tan and Long now. “Your father and my late brother fought together. Put that away,” he said, indicating the bottle of murky rice wine with distaste. “We’ll toast your father’s memory, but not with that garbage. Sit down here—make room for them, Field Rat!” Long did not want to drink with Old Ma, and he certainly did not want to drink to the memory of Duc Phan, but the man they called the Field Rat was already reluctantly scooting down to the end of the table, and a waiter had brought over three new chairs and three new sets of glasses, bowls, and chopsticks. Binh made herself comfortable in the seat beside Old Ma and tossed her motorbike keys down on the tabletop. Another one of the farmhands bent over to take new beers out of the crate, but Long, who was now the youngest at the table, deferentially knelt and retrieved them first. He served them carefully, topping up Old Ma’s glass first and then moving counterclockwise around the table to fill those of the farmhands. He made sure to pour extra generously when he got to Tan and could feel his brother working to maintain an expression that did not reveal how much he disliked beer. Long gave himself and Binh slightly less than the others, because he was worried that she was getting drunk too quickly, but Old Ma himself snatched the bottle out of his hands and proceeded to fill their glasses to the brim.
“Shall we start with fifty percent?” he asked, making a slash with his finger halfway up the side of the glass.
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly drink on an empty stomach,” said Binh sweetly, with her eyebrows raised. Old Ma gave a wheezy chuckle and waved the waiter over again.
“Order whatever you like,” he said to Binh. “This is a special occasion—it isn’t every day a lady joins us and we get to drink to the memory of the great Duc Phan.”
Binh didn’t bother to look at the menu. “Beef.”
“Two plates of fried beef topped with pickled onions,” said Old Ma to the waiter. “And then some bò lá lốt.” Long heard Tan’s stomach burble. “Is that enough beef? In the meantime,” he said, gesturing to their uneaten frog legs, “you’ll have to help us make some room on the table. Field Rat, fill up her bowl for her.”
Long felt sorry for Field Rat, who obligingly leaned over to serve Binh a pair of oily amphibian thighs and a chunk of blackened mystery flesh from the dish at the center of the table. His hair was still damp, and the skin on the back of his neck looked recently scrubbed. Long imagined that he had sped home after work to shower carefully and change into his good clothes before coming to drink with his boss. He wore jeans that looked tight and shiny and cheaply made, and a striped polo shirt that was too big; the sleeves of it came down past his elbows.
Binh speared the morsel of charred meat with her chopsticks and waved it aloft. “What’s this?” she asked.
Old Ma grinned. “Dog. It’s very good for women to eat, you know. Especially pregnant ones.” He watched, with an expression that Long didn’t like, as Binh gnawed the flesh off of the bone. “Are you able to drink now?” he said when she had finished swallowing.
Binh flicked her cleaned bone onto the floor and then picked up her beer. “Your men won’t be coming into work tomorrow—they’ll be too embarrassed that a girl outdrank them,” she said, and they clinked glasses.
Their first toasts were predictable fare—they drank to the memory of Duc Phan, who had apparently saved a comrade’s life in the jungles of Kon Tum, and to the good health of Binh’s aunt and uncle, to Tan’s continued success at the police academy, and to Long’s university scholarship. With each one, half a beer was drained. One of the crates was emptied and cleared away by the waiter. The beef dishes arrived, and Long had to concentrate hard to keep from dropping his chopsticks or the meat onto the floor.
By the time the table was halfway through the second crate, the toasts that Old Ma proposed were growing more and more outlandish. They drank to Field Rat someday finding a wife who would put up with his overbearing mother, they drank to the lucky sixth toe on another farmhand’s foot, they drank to Tan and Long encouraging their fat grandma to take up aerobics. Binh’s language became saltier with each empty beer bottle that was retired to the ground, but her profanity only seemed to amuse Old Ma. Long found himself needing to grip the edge of the table to keep from feeling spinny. His brother’s face had turned a magenta shade that contrasted horribly with his uniform—Tan was drunk despite the fact that since sitting down, he had been keeping his pint glass filled with ice and cupping it between his hot hands so it would melt faster and dilute the beer. Old Ma had wagered that if Tan could make it until Fat Uncle’s closing time without needing to go throw up (as the six-toed farmhand had already done), he would put in a good word for him with the police captain he knew in Pleiku. Long wished that the bet was with him instead, because even though he was notorious for vomiting on the bus, he always kept everything down when he was drinking. He knew he shouldn’t like Old Ma—the man had to be bad, there was no way that he could be so rich if he wasn’t—but could not help but need his approval. He found himself constantly wishing for the man’s attention to turn to him, and when it did, a warm mix of pride and gratitude at being noticed would wash over his whole body. It was the same kind of potent magnetic pull that Binh also possessed.
The restaurant was beginning to empty out. The two bored girls had left with their stumbling boyfriends a while ago. The six-toed farmhand could no longer hold himself up in his chair, and so one of the others had to take him home, apologizing profusely to Old Ma for not staying until the end of the night. When Binh stood up to go to the bathroom, her chair toppled onto its side. She kicked it out of the way instead of picking it up and walked to the toilets with one steadying hand held against the wall.
Old Ma himself rose and righted the fallen chair. “That girl is a savage,” he chuckled, and Long loathed himself for laughing along with the others. Then Old Ma picked up her motorbike keys from the table and tossed them to Field Rat, who slipped them into his pants pocket. Tan, who had been bent over trying to sneakily breathe hot air onto the ice in his glass, did not notice, but Long saw, and turned to Old Ma, baffled. Old Ma held a finger up to his lips.
Binh sauntered back to the table. Her hair was all wet—she had clearly been splashing water on her face in the bathroom. “Uncle,” she announced, “thank you for the food and the beer. But it’s time for us to go now.” She rested a hand on Long’s shoulder, and he turned his head what he hoped was an imperceptible amount so that his chin could subtly graze her fingernails. “They have an early drive down to Saigon, and I want to go buy dried squid from Bà Ly around the corner before she closes her stall. It’s the only thing that cures my hangovers.” She reached around behind her bowl, expecting her fingers to meet her keys, and frowned when they did not. Quickly she patted down the pockets of her coveralls, and then she began to push aside every bowl on the table and look underneath each platter. Long watched Old Ma curb a smile starting at the edges of his wrinkled mouth.
“Should you really be driving in your condition?” asked Old Ma.
Binh blinked, and suddenly she seemed dangerously sober. “Who took them?” she said.
“I’m sure they’ve just fallen on the ground; Long, why don’t you help her look for them?” He gave Long a perfectly bland smile, and Long found himself kneeling down beneath the table and going through the motions of rummaging through the empty bottles. His feet slipped on Binh’s chewed-up bones. “If you can’t find them, you can just come home with me,” he heard Old Ma saying above him. “I’ll have a new set for you made in the morning. I can give you a whole new motorbike, if that’s easier. No? All right, how about this,” he added cagily. “If you give one of us a kiss, you’ll get your keys back.” Long stared up at him from the floor. The old man’s smile had widened slightly. “Anyone you like; you can pick one of your friends if you’d prefer. Just one sweet little kiss.”
Binh looked from Tan to Long, from Long back to Tan. Long’s heart sank. Her upper lip had curled up and was twitching. “Tell me where my fucking keys are,” she snarled at Tan.
“I don’t know what you did with them!” Tan bellowed back.
Binh picked up an empty bottle by the neck. “Tell me where they are.” Everyone who still remained at Fat Uncle’s was watching their table now.
“I told you that I don’t know!”
She smashed the bottle against his knee. It did not bleed immediately—after the noise of the cracking glass and Tan’s single, sharp cry, everyone at the table looked down and saw that his pants were torn, but that the leg seemed fine otherwise. There was a moment of stasis. And then, as they were watching, blood suddenly came seeping through the olive fabric, a scarlet patch like a handprint with long fingers stretching down his calf. Binh had dropped the jagged remains of the bottle onto the ground and was reaching for a new one.
“Wait! He has them!” cried Long from the ground, pointing to Field Rat. He could not bring himself to look at Old Ma, and so he met Binh’s eyes instead. And for one terrifying instant she gazed at Long with an expression that was not rage but the kind of hollowness that he knew from his mother’s face. He was relieved when anger replaced it once more and she turned to the Field Rat, her grip tightening on the bottle’s neck.
“Do not strike him,” said Old Ma calmly. “You’ve had your fun, and we’ve had ours. Now you’re getting out of hand. You can do whatever you like to your friends, but you will not assault my workers. If you do, there will be consequences. Do you understand? Think of your aunt and uncle. Now, put down that bottle. Field Rat, stand up please.”
Long half expected Binh to ignore him and attack the man anyway, but she slowly set the beer bottle down on the table.
“Very good. Your motorbike keys are in his right pants pocket. No, no!—don’t you move, Field Rat. Just stand right there; she has to come and get them herself. Well, girl? What are you waiting for?” Binh shot him a look of pure poison and walked over to Field Rat, who waited with his arms slightly raised from his sides, a sloppy grin on his face.
Because his pants were so tight, she couldn’t just quickly reach in and snatch out the keys. Binh had to wriggle her hand down into the pocket. Long could see the outline of each of her fingers through the thin, shiny denim. When she finally grabbed hold of the keys her hand got briefly stuck, and she had to tug several times before finally getting free. Field Rat snickered. Binh did not look at any of them again. She spat onto the table and then ran out of the restaurant with her head bowed. Long heard her engine revving shortly afterward.
“Binh.” He breathed the word rather than saying it; his exhalation took the shape of her name. Forgetting that his brother’s knee was bleeding all over the floor, no longer caring about the approval of Old Ma, Long stumbled out after her.
She was already gone, of course, and he stood in the street for a minute, wondering what he should do. He wobbled over to Bà Ly’s squid stall and purchased two, asking the woman to just bag them up for him without grilling them first. He was convinced that if he could just find Binh and deliver the squid to her, she would forgive him.
Long searched for her in every tree in the cashew orchard. He walked around and around the cemetery, too drunk to be frightened, calling her name. When his feet grew too sore to keep going, he dragged himself over to the statue of the weeping woman and climbed the base. It had seemed so enormous when they were children, but now he could scale it with little effort in the dark. Clutching the squid bag in his teeth, he pulled himself up to the dead soldier and lay himself down across the stone body, assuming its pose. Then he waited. Sometime before dawn, Binh came blistering into the graveyard on foot, with Tan limping after her.
He was too far away to make out exactly what they were saying, but Long could hear dislocated strands of the argument echoing off of tombstones when they raised their voices.
“…because I would never lie to you…”
“…all along!…a fucking coward…”
“…do you know how long I…”
“…nothing! Nothing!” followed by pottery shattering against stone—it sounded like Binh had kicked a grave vase. Then they walked on in hostile silence, Tan lagging a few steps behind and struggling to keep up.
Their two angry shapes were drawing closer to the statue. They were almost at the cluster of graves where, twelve years ago, they had agreed to a wager with a monster in a hat. Suddenly, Tan sprinted forward to plant himself directly in Binh’s path. Moonlight lacquered the dark blood on his knee. It daubed its pearlescence onto his hair, onto Binh’s hair, onto the rounded toes of Binh’s rubber boots. Long shrank away from it, clinging to the shadows in the lap of the statue, trying not to rustle the squid bag.
“So then hit me again!” Tan roared at Binh. “You can take out the other leg this time!”
Binh said nothing. Long counted eleven quick heartbeats swooshing against his chest as he watched her stand still and look at Tan. Then she reached up and pulled his head down to hers. Long would never forgive the moon for making him see Binh’s face when she kissed him. He did not count it in heartbeats, but it was long enough that he knew there had been hunger in it. It was long enough that Tan’s fingers found their way into her hair.
Binh broke away first, pushing Tan aside and then beginning to walk again.
“There. I did it,” she said, without looking back at him. “I lost, and I did it, and now I never want to see you again.”
“Binh.”
“Don’t follow me anymore. I’m going to go to the only place where you’re too afraid to follow, and I’m going to stay in there until you’re gone.”
She had picked up speed now. She was running toward the rubber plantation. Tan could not match her pace, and he stopped anyway once he saw where she was going. “You can’t!” he called, his voice cracking in a way that Long knew his brother was ashamed of. “It’s not safe!” Binh never looked back. She entered the trees without hesitating. A flash of white boots and she was gone.
Tan stood at the edge of the forest and Long lay on the statue, neither of them moving. She had been right; they were too afraid to follow. Eventually Tan turned and began to walk back across the graveyard in the direction of their home.
Now you can run in and save her, Long told himself. It could still be you.
He climbed down from the statue, but he did not go into the rubber trees. He knew it had not been Binh’s first time.
When he returned to the house Tan was asleep, his bloody pants on the ground beside the wooden bed. In the last of the wasting darkness, Long finally started packing. His small backpack only held three identical outfits, his paperwork, Binh’s old tamarind tin—which she had forgotten to take back years ago and he had never returned—and the two dried squid. He finished as the sun rose, his mother awake with it. She picked Tan’s pants up off the floor and brought them out back to wash them but did not ask Long what had happened. Long helped her load up her lychee baskets for market, and only after he had carried them out to the gate for her did she suddenly remember that he was leaving today, and she stood on tiptoe to kiss him goodbye on the forehead.
There was a bus heading south at six-thirty, and Long told himself that he deserved the motion sickness that awaited him. He took the broom from the corner and thumped it softly against the wall. After a pause he heard the same pattern tapped back to him from inside his grandmother’s room. He smiled and then lifted his bag.
He did not wake Tan up to say goodbye. In a way this made things easier—what had happened at the restaurant, what they had each seen the other do. Something had finally broken completely, and its irreversibility was a relief from the years of painful stretching that had preceded it, from the agony of waiting for the snap.
When the bus rolled through downtown Ia Kare, it didn’t come to a complete stop—it opened its doors and slowed down just enough for the passengers to run alongside it and then leap on board. Long’s history of motion sickness on the local route was so storied that the bus attendant recognized him when he got on. He gave Long a plastic trash can to barf in instead of the usual plastic bag and made him promise to sit next to an open window.
The bus drove south all day and in the early evening, Saigon finally appeared like a gray smudge on the horizon.