When Roy was eleven years old, he got a job delivering Chinese food on a bicycle. He was paid twenty-five cents an hour and a dime for each delivery, plus tips. He worked three nights a week from five o’clock until eight, and from four to eight on Sundays. Kow Kow Restaurant provided the bicycle, which was equipped with baskets attached to the handlebars and mounted on the rear fender. Roy was also fed dinner, for which he usually requested a hamburger on toast, vegetable chow mein and egg foo yung. He enjoyed this job except when the weather was really foul, which was when he often had the most deliveries. Riding in traffic over icy streets or in driving rain was difficult, but he was skillful enough to avoid any serious mishaps during the year or so that he worked as a delivery boy.
Every Sunday night a man came into Kow Kow at eight twenty, ten minutes before closing. This was also the time when Roy ate his dinner. The man always sat in one of the two red leather booths on either side of the front window and ordered the same items: won ton soup with extra dumplings, served extra hot; shrimp fried rice; and two pots of tea, also extra hot. He was in his late forties or early fifties, had a three or four day beard, was of medium height and size, wore the same brown sportcoat, a black shirt buttoned up to his neck and a weather-punished brown Fedora, which he did not remove while he ate.
Don Soon, the owner’s son, always waited on him. Don was twenty-three, he smiled a lot and Roy liked him the best of anyone at Kow Kow, although all of the guys who worked there—waiters, cooks and kitchen help—were nice to him. No women worked at Kow Kow. Mr. Soon, the owner, tended the cash register while seated on a high stool behind a counter near the entrance.
He said the same thing to every customer after ringing up the bill: “You come back. We waiting for you.” Mr. Soon spoke Cantonese to his employees but when speaking to his son and to Roy he used perfect English. When Roy asked Don why his father spoke pidgin to non-Asian customers, Don said, “He thinks they expect it, so he does his Charlie Chan act. This is a chop suey joint—you get egg roll and atmosphere.”
One Sunday night, when Don was in the kitchen and Mr. Soon had left early, the man in the hat, as the employees called him, looked over at Roy, who was eating his dinner at a nearby table, and said, “Hey, kid, you work here, don’t you?”
Roy nodded. “I do deliveries.”
“You suppose you could go in the kitchen and tell ’em I’m ready for my second pot of tea?”
“Sure,” Roy said, and stood up.
“Make sure you tell ’em ‘extra hot.’”
“Okay.”
“Sorry to disturb your meal.”
“No problem,” Roy said, and walked back to the kitchen.
He came back and sat down.
“Don’s bringing it,” he said to the man in the hat.
“Thanks, kid.”
Thirty seconds later, Don Soon brought the man a pot of tea, smiled at him and walked away.
“These are nice people here,” the man said to Roy.
“They are,” said Roy.
“They pay you good?”
“Enough, I guess.”
“This waiter, he’s always smiling.”
“His name is Don. He’s the owner’s son.”
“He reminds me of an Arab I knew when I worked in the oil fields in Saudi. His name was Rashid bin Rashid. Bin means ‘son of.’ He smiled all the time, too. This Rashid, he captured falcons and sold ’em. He showed me how to do it. Took a pet pigeon and tied a long piece of string to one of its legs and the other one to a stone. We sat and waited until a falcon flew over, then Rashid threw the pigeon up into the air and we took off. The falcon swooped down and killed the pigeon and when he brought it to the ground we ran back and chased the falcon away. Then we dug a shallow pit in the sand downwind of the dead pigeon. Rashid got into the pit holding the end of the string tied to the stone. I covered him with a blanket and he told me to get far away. When the falcon came back to finish picking at its kill, Rashid slowly reeled in the pigeon. As soon as the falcon got close to him, Rashid reached out and grabbed it.”
The front window behind the man was streaked with rain. Roy was glad he had finished his deliveries before it started. The man poured himself a fresh cup of tea and took a long sip.
“The Arabs mostly drank coffee,” he said, “sometimes tea. They like it boiling hot. I got used to drinking it that way.”
“How long were you in Saudi Arabia?” Roy asked.
“Three and a half years. Made a pile. Gone now.”
Roy stood and picked up his dishes to take to the kitchen.
“Nice talking to you,” he said. “I enjoyed the story about catching a falcon in the desert.”
The man in the hat poured more tea.
“If you’re here next Sunday, I’ll tell you about the time I helped save a camel from drowning in quicksand.”
“I’ll be here,” said Roy.
He never saw the man again. A few weeks after their conversation, Roy asked Don Soon if the man had come in at a time when he wasn’t working. Don said no, that as far as he knew the man in the hat had not been back since that night.
“You must have told him about a better Chinese restaurant,” said Don.
Roy asked Mr. Soon if he’d seen him, and Mr. Soon shook his head and said, “White ghost all look same.” Then Mr. Soon smiled and messed up Roy’s hair with his right hand. “Just kidding, Roy,” he said. “No, I don’t know what happened to him. He always left a fair tip. I hate to lose a good customer.”
In his second year of high school, four years after he’d stopped working at Kow Kow, Roy came across a book on a shelf in the school library about falcons and falconry. He immediately remembered the man in the hat’s story. Roy looked through the book to see if there was any information on capturing falcons but there was not. Most of the text was about training the birds to hunt, which seemed silly to Roy because it was obvious that a falcon knows how to hunt without a man having to teach it. He put the book back on the shelf. There were millions of pigeons in the city, Roy thought. They shit on everything. Chicago would be a better place, he decided, if more falcons lived there.