The Reluctant Bigamist(Barry) When Karla Pilsudski stopped by her brother’s place, she found Mickey, crouched behind the living room sofa peeking through the curtains. Around his thick neck hung a chain of armor-piercing, machine gun shells. The week after his Army discharge, he bored the quarter-inch holes in the soft, brass casings, later threading the bullets together on a length of rawhide. Like so many golden, shark’s teeth, the shells fanned out across a khaki T-shirt with a gash under the left armpit.

Karla placed a grocery bag on the coffee table. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Reconnoitering,” he muttered, without turning his head. “A full battalion of VC recently infiltrated the countryside.”

A gawky woman with plain features and a thin, residual scar below her nose from a harelip, Karla leaned closer for a better look, almost rising up on Mickey’s shoulders piggyback style. In the next yard over, two, oriental girls were building a clumsy, wooden frame with two-by-fours and a bag of 8-penny nails. The rectangular structure lay on the uneven ground. “Your new neighbors are Cambodian, not Vietnamese,” she noted.

Tat. Tat. Tat. The older girl, plump and in her thirties, alternately hammered the studs together then tug them apart. The younger, much prettier girl stood to one side wearing a goofy, ineffectual grin. Lost in adolescent reveries, she held the bag of nails against her meager breasts.

“What are they doing?”

“Building a storage shed.” Mickey gestured with his eyes at a mound of rubble directly behind the girls. “A squad of enemy sympathizers poured the foundation last weekend.”

Karla cringed. “I wish you wouldn’t talk crazy.”

The girls moved a few feet away and were hidden behind a Scotch pine. Mickey lurched to the next window over. Now a tangled clothesline with its T-shaped poles was blocking his view. He had absent-mindedly left the rope out all winter; having repeatedly frozen and thawed so many times, the cotton cord was ruined. Cracked and discolored, the old-fashioned, wooden clothespins weren’t much better. Not that Mickey bothered much with laundry in recent years. A month after they moved in, the Cambodians installed a sleek, umbrella-shaped unit, the metal pole sunk in a foot-deep tub of cement and crushed stone. The clothesline arms folded straight up and out of the way when not in use.

“A friend of mine works at the Providence Housing Authority. He says a Cambodian family in one of their second floor units lined their living room floor with plastic drop clothes, spread a six-inch layer of topsoil and planted rice.”

“Preposterous!” Karla eyed her brother suspiciously. “How did management find out?”

“Drop cloth sprang a leak, flooding the apartment below.”

“Racist hogwash!”

“Yeah, well I’ve heard the same, whacky story from three, semi-reliable sources.” Mickey scratched an inflamed hair follicle buried in his scruffy beard. “Drive down Cranston Street. On every dilapidated corner, all you see are Cambodian markets, nail salons and eateries.”

“Blight with a Southeast Asian hue,” Karla interjected acidly, anticipating his train of thought.

“They doubled and tripled-up in single bedroom apartments,” he ignored her sarcasm. “Extended families of grandparents, in-laws, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, and in-bred, halfwit second cousins once removed.”

“So what’s your point?” Karla pressed.

Mickey reached into his front pocket and fingered a joint the size of an Italian sweet sausage - pure Maui-wowi. Hawaii's finest. He tested the ends to insure they were twisted tight. “Nothing,” he muttered without conceding defeat. “A simple statement of historical fact.”

It was ninety degrees, the middle of August. In an hour or so, he would pedal his ten-speed bike into Brandenburg Center, sit on an isolated bench in the rear of the Veteran’s Memorial Park and get blissfully wrecked. Around two pm, he’d wander over to Bagels and Cream for the luncheon special and a cup of mocha Java cappuccino, then return to his spot in the leafy park until dusk. A perfect day... a no-brainer.

“Goddam nails are too short,” Mickey grumbled peevishly. “The slightest breeze would blow the foolish structure over.”

“It’s none of your business how they build their shed if, in fact, that’s what they’re doing.”

“I wouldn’t build an outhouse with anything less than three-and-a-half inch nails.” Mickey lumbered away from the window and grabbed the grocery bag. “Where’s the Heineken?”

Karla’s expression soured. “Last thing you need,” she said, pointing at a beer gut which resembled a full term pregnancy. Following him into the kitchen, she watched as her brother sorted the groceries.

“You never called my girlfriend. It’s been a month now,” Karla said.

“The gay divorcée?”

She removed an empty beer can from the piano bench. Liquid had seeped through the finish to the porous wood below and left a darkened halo. Most of the furniture had similar, alcohol-induced blemishes. “Betty’s the new deaconess at church. You might have known that if you ever showed up for Sunday services.”

Mickey opened the refrigerator and slid a tub of unsalted butter onto the middle rack. “Her husband ran off.”

“The marriage ended by mutual consent.”

“Then why’d he bail out on the woman?” Mickey pressed.

“Betty,” she said casually, “is a bit of a fussbudget.”

He set a box of pitted prunes in the cupboard. “Which is to say, the woman’s a control freak... an anal compulsive whacko?”

The scar on her top lip flexed and furrowed in a bleak smile. “We’ll put Betty on hold for now.” Karla glanced at her watch. “Kids will be home from school soon. I gotta run.”

She turned to go but Mickey grabbed her arm and gestured in the direction of the Cambodian’s property. “Three, shitty years in Vietnam, and now I got to wake up and look at these slant-eye assholes every day for the rest of my life.”

*****

Mickey glanced distractedly about the bedroom. A cardboard box with empty beer cans lay in one corner. The bed was unmade, the top sheet trailing on the floor. A dust bunny the size of a small rodent peeked out from behind the box. Next to a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza, a pile of girlie magazines littered the night table. Mickey never paid full price. Rather, he bought outdated, remaindered issues - three for ten dollars - the front covers ripped off.

Retrieving a carpenter’s belt from the floor, he slipped a hammer into the rawhide loop and clipped a Stanley 25-foot Powerlock II tape measure to the leather pouch.

“Excuse me,” Mickey hollered, stepping over the property line, “but I couldn’t help notice.” The heavier girl straightened up and stared coolly at him while her younger sister giggled and looked embarrassedly away. Mickey drew the tape from his work belt and ran the yellow blade the length of the bottom board. “None of these studs are centered.”

The older girl edged forward and stared blankly at the metal tape. Mickey pointed to a thin, black line with arrows on either end which bisected the blade every 16 inches and began marking the wood with a flat, carpenter’s pencil. “This is where you want the studs for a proper, nailing surface.” Fishing a hammer from the leather belt, he struck the base sharply, separating it from the others boards. The pretty girl jumped, scampering toward the house.

“You barge into our yard uninvited,” the older girl hissed, “and tear our new shed apart.” Squat and nondescript, she had little of the exotic charm usually associated with oriental woman. Using the claw, Mickey began removing the bent nails. “What are you doing now?”

“These nails are too short. They won’t hold a shed together.” Mickey retrieved one of the ruined nails and tossed it over his shoulder.. “Wouldn’t build an outhouse with anything this flimsy.” He lumbered back to his house and returned moments later with a pail of 16-penney, framing nails and a 48-inch level.

Ignoring the women, he hammered the wood together, two nails in either end, to form a simple box, then sandwiched the remaining, five studs at equal intervals. Placing the level on the foundation, Mickey lifted one end and checked the yellow bubble. “Foundation’s cockeyed. You’ll have to shim the front in order to keep construction straight up and down.”

“And if we choose not to?” The older girl blustered.

Mickey put his hand in his pocket and fingered the bulging joint. “It’s the weekend,” He replied ignoring the question. “I won’t need these tools until Monday morning. Consider the nails a gift, an unsolicited act of Caucasian kindness.” Leaving the tools and nails strewn on the ground, he wandered back to his own house.

*****

Around five, Mickey returned from the park. In the next yard over, the rear and two side walls were standing erect on the foundation which had been shimmed with remnants of cedar shingles to a perfect 90 degrees. “Sonofabitch!” he muttered.

Around eight o’clock, there was a knock at the door. The two, Cambodian sisters were standing on the front stoop with a brown paper bag. “I rang the bell for the longest time,” the older girl noted peevishly. Without being asked, she stepped over the threshold and into the house. “I’m Rasmei Butt and my sister’s name is Mearadey.”

The last person brazen enough to show up unannounced was a Jehovah Witness hawking salvation and back issues of The Watchtower. As the spiritual zealot was just getting up a head of apocalyptic steam, Mickey went into the bedroom to locate some of his own, illustrated literature, and the visit was abruptly curtailed.

“And you are?” Rasmei asked.

Mickey tentatively sniffed the air. “Something smells good.”

“Your name, please.”

“Mickey .” He moved a few steps closer. “What’s in the bag?”

“My family runs an oriental restaurant. We brought you some delicacies.”

Mickey whisked the bag into the kitchen and began opening containers. “Mooshi beef with hoisin sauce,” Rasmei said, indicating a dish with a half dozen, thin, rice flour pancakes, “and shrimp fried lort.”

The sink was full of dirty plates. Along with the oil-stained pizza box, a half-dozen crumpled beer cans littered the counter near the refrigerator. Grabbing a fork and clean plate from the cupboard, she scooped the food onto the dish. “Six treasure chicken.” Rasmei held a selection up to his nose. “Each treasure represents a spice: fennel, anise, ginger, licorice root, cinnamon and clove.” She stared blankly through a torn undershirt at his hairy chest. “It’s the house specialty. Very popular.”

“No fortune cookie?”

“Fortune cookies are reserved for paying customers,” Rasmei replied laconically.

Only now Mickey noticed that the older girl wasn’t really fat - at least not like the slobby hausfraus-turned-soft-porn-queens in the grosser, triple-X girlie magazines. The Cambodian woman was short and compact with wide, almond eyes and a fleshy, pushed-in nose. The skin was dark as chocolate ice cream. An unromantic, no-nonsense face.

“I have a proposition,” she said as he was reaching for a second helping.

Mickey waved a greasy fork in the air. “Barter food for brawn.”

Her wide nostrils flared. The younger girl sat down at the table and stared at her nails which were decorated in an elaborate, multicolored pattern. “Mearadey and I will do the actual building,” Rasmei clarified. “I only need you to straighten things out as you did earlier when we hadn’t spaced the boards properly.”

Mickey pried open a plastic container of golden sauce dusted with bright red flecks of cayenne pepper. He didn’t know what pained him more: the prospect of dealing with the insufferable older sister or supervising the ineffectual Mearadey, with her straight, black hair falling down to the small of her slender back. “I could only help on weekends and, even then, it’d take a good month to get the walls covered, shingle the roof and hang doors. Why are you doing this?”

“It’s a birthday present for our father.”

An image of the sour-faced, ill-humored Mr. Butt flitted through his brain.

Earlier in the week, while changing the oil in his truck, Mickey had met his new neighbor. Lying flat on his back, he had just cracked the nut on the oil pan and was sliding a plastic tub under the chassis when he looked up. An older man with dark features and a sunken chest was staring down at him like a stupid bug. The man scowled, and then walked briskly away without a word or friendly gesture. “Jerk!” Mickey pulled the plug out of the oil pan and felt the scalding oil curl around his thumb like a knife blade. “Weasel-faced, bastard!”

Rasmei drifted to the window and admired her handiwork one yard over. “We could have easily gotten the front wall up, but for two, minor details.”

“Which were?”

“Doors and window.” Mearadey placed an ornately painted hand over her mouth and tittered fitfully.

Mickey closed the containers, took a swig of beer and belched. “In the morning, with your perseverance and Mearadey’s moral support, we’ll build the front wall.” Rasmei gestured to her sister that it was time to leave and the lithe girl, who had hardly uttered a word since entering the house, rose to her feet and padded soundlessly to the door.

As they reached the living room, Rasmei said, “Are you eccentric or just making a fashion statement?”

“I could ask the same of you,” Mickey shot back, indicating the loose fitting, wraparound silk skirts that both girls were wearing.

She fingered one of the 30-caliber, shell casing that hung from his wide neck and scowled with a bland, almost clinical detachment. “My dress is called a sampot, a traditional Cambodian garment.” She scratched her fleshy nose. “You were in the army during the Vietnam War?”

“Three years near Pleiku… at a firebase in the Annamese highlands.”

“You made it home in one piece,” Rasmei observed. "The war was already over when I graduated from high school."

"Didn't miss much." Mickey shot back. "In 1967, General Westmoreland decided to go after the Viet Cong with US infantry. Operation Fairfax. The goal was to harass and ambush enemy units operating in the countryside around Saigon." It was still light out but the sun was beginning to fade causing familiar images to blend and blur. "We killed 3,000 NVA and Viet Cong troops. Three thousand… a nice round number."

"American casualties?" Rasmei asked.
"Nineteen hundred troops were lost in the operation." Mickey spoke in a dull monotone as though citing historical statistics. "In April, there was another series of bloody engagements. We destroyed a thousand NVA at Loc Ninh, fifteen hundred more further north at Dak To." "Of course, we were just pissing in the wind. The whole, cruddy war was a fraud, a bad joke played out at our expense."

*****

Mickey spent three years in Viet Nam. When the lieutenant in charge of his unit stepped on an anti-personnel mine, he was promoted to platoon sergeant. His first kill occurred during a routine sentry duty at a firebase in the Mekong Delta. Not that there was anything routine about killing someone.

Two hours into Mickey’s watch, a Viet Cong soldier dressed in baggy, blue cotton pants came up over a ridge into the clearing a hundred and ten yards away. The man, in his early twenties, was lean and muscular. He carried an AK 47 assault rifle and a leather cartridge belt with ammunition clips slung around his neck. Alone, the enemy soldier sauntered towards him at a relaxed, loping gait as though he had no idea there might be any Americans close by. Mickey fixed the man's chest squarely in the crosshair of his scope sight and squeezed off a round. There was a delay between the report of exploding gun powder and its consequence. The man dropped or, more precisely, slumped forward on his face, and did not stir or make a sound. The bullet struck squarely in the heart.

The body just lay there, inert and insubstantial, all the vibrant energy dissipated by the quarter-inch ball of lead. Mickey sat up in the foxhole and looked around. Nothing. The birds, which had fallen silent when the gun erupted, resumed their cheerful chatter. A warm breeze drew the scent of orange blossoms from God-knows-where into his nostrils driving out the acrid scent of burnt powder.

Ten minutes passed. A pastel-colored moth, unearthly huge and ephemeral, flitted over the tall grass before disappearing into the thick brush. The body never moved. Not that he expected it to, but now the trajectory of his life had catapulted crazily off course. A man was dead and Mickey was sitting comfortably in a foxhole surrounded by orange blossoms and a chortling chorus of birds and bull frogs.

For the next month, every young, Vietnamese woman he passed was the dead man's wife or kid sister - every middle-aged couple his mother and father anxiously waiting a triumphant homecoming and, with each passing day, fearing the worse. Other murderous battles would engage his mind; he fought his heart out and counted his blessing to remain among the living. But this first kill was too ordinary and unambiguous. The man in the blue pants came up over the ridge, and Mickey placed a 30-millimeter slug through his heart. The enemy combatant had no opportunity to defend himself - not that war was a gentleman's sport; in retrospect, Mickey felt no obligation, moral or otherwise, to act differently.

The first years following the war, Mickey carried on an obsessive, almost ritualistic, dialogue with the dead man’s family. At weird hours of the early morning when his insomnia kicked into overdrive, he would review the circumstances surrounding the Vietnamese soldier's death. He gathered the family members together inside his head - a confluence of sympathetic minds and spirits. Never asking forgiveness, rather he begged them to understand the insane logic of war.

The scene always played itself out with the same, predictable denouement, his imagination unable to sway or even marginally influence the outcome. The dead man’s family listened impassively, without the slightest hint of emotion. In the end, they simply turned and shuffled silently away, leaving Mickey to rot in the purgatory of an inconsolable conscience.

*****

Kicking off his left shoe, Mickey removed the sock, and revealed a jagged inch-and-a-half long scar resembling a Rorschach inkblot on the instep.

“How’d that happen?” Rasmei inquired.

“Along with landmines, the VC buried bamboo stakes in the mud and high grass. I caught a punji stick on a routine patrol. Spent the next, three months recuperating at a naval hospital in Yokuska, Japan.” Mickey put his sock back on. “Sometimes, the bastards crapped on the sharpened sticks.”

Mearadey grimaced and looked away. Her sister never flinched.
“Four years after your war ended,” Rasmei said, “the North Vietnamese invaded my homeland and liberated us from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. I was ten years old. My family fled north along Route 6 to Angkor Wat, then west into Thailand. Five years later, we immigrated to America.” Rasmei shook her head thoughtfully. “Perhaps you have bad feelings toward my people because of your experience during the war.”

Mickey put his shoe and sock back on. “I’m a misanthrope not a racist,” He replied gruffly.

“Then you are just like my father,” she said without explanation and walked out into the warm night air, her addle-brained sister following on her heels.

*****

The next morning after finishing off the last of the six treasure chicken, Mickey sidled over to the Butt’s back yard. Placing a base and top plate side by side, he marked the openings for the doors and window. Less than an hour later, the fourth wall was plumbed and toe nailed in place. “We’ll need half-inch plywood for the floor and roof. About the siding, do you have any preference?”

“Whatever you suggest,” Rasmei replied.

“Texture one-eleven is durable and takes a stain well.”

“Draw up a shopping list. I’ll have it delivered.”

Mickey scratched his crotch and stared at his Chevy, 2-ton pickup truck parked in the driveway. “There are a few small items - joist hangers, hinges, galvanized nails. I’ll swing by Home Depot one night after work.”

“Let me know; I’ll join you.” Before he could mount an intelligible protest, she added, “My father is so pleased with his new shed! I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

*****

On Thursday late in the day, Mickey pulled up in front of the Cambodians’ home and beeped the horn. Rasmei hurried out to the truck. “There’s been a slight change in plans.” As she spoke, the front door opened; Mearadey, her father, mother and an elderly woman with a wrinkled face filed onto the front lawn.

Rasmei hauled herself up into the cab of the pickup truck and beckoned to her relatives. “My family will be joining us.”

The entourage piled into a metallic blue Subaru. “I don’t get it,” Mickey grumbled.

“It’s a cultural thing. Cambodians tend to go places and make important decisions as a group.”

Mickey turned the engine over and pulled away from the curbed. Immediately the Subaru inched up behind him. In the rear view mirror he could see the father, staring stiffly straight ahead. “Your old man, ...does he ever smile?”

Rasmei considered the question briefly. “No, not often.”

At the lumber supply store Mickey got a cart and loaded the bottom with twelve-foot, pressure treated two-by-fours. The elderly woman with the wrinkled face said something to Rasmei in her native tongue. “She wants to know what the wood is for.”

“The sub floor.”

Rasmei translated. The woman pointed to another pile of lumber and spoke again, favoring the n’s and g’s, in a rubbery, singsong fashion. “She says these boards are less expensive.”

“Perhaps,” Mickey muttered under his breath, “Granny would like to subcontract the project.”

“She’s just trying to be thrifty.”

“Tell her that these boards are stronger and won’t rot as quickly.”

Rasmei translated and the old woman’s wiry, chicken neck bobbed up and down approvingly. The next aisle over, Mickey found the metal joist hangers, hinges, door latch sets and 2-inch, galvanized nails. Again, the old woman questioned the nails. “Tell her they’re zinc coated to resist rust. That’s why they’re more expensive.” Only Mr. Butt, whose thoughts were engaged elsewhere, appeared less than satisfied with the explanation.

On the ride home Rasmei said, “That went well.”

“Sure did,” Mickey confirmed and took one last look in the rear view mirror. Rasmei’s mother was sitting in the passenger seat gesturing with her hands and laughing heartily. Her husband, impervious to her bright humor, looked thoroughly morose.

“Mearadey bought a cloth, carpenters apron so she will have a place to put the nails and hold her hammer,” Rasmei said.

“Does she know how to talk?”

“Of course she can. She’s just very shy.”

Mickey shrugged. “She hardly ever says a thing in my presence.”

*****

On Saturday Mickey showed the girls how to evenly space the metal hangers for the sub floor while he snapped a blue chalk line and, with a circular saw, trimmed the flooring to fit. Mearadey swaggered about the yard getting little accomplished but looking radiant with her apron full of annular nails, the hammer slung rakishly from her hip. At one point, she went into the house and returned with a pitcher of ice tea.

“According to Rasmei,” Mickey said, “you’re not a deaf mute.” Still holding the empty drink tray, Mearadey looked perplexed. “Say something.”

“What do you want me to say?” she replied

“That’s more than enough.”

An hour later, he left them with a scroll saw to trim the openings and hang the texture one-eleven. “Next week we’ll work on the roof.”

Mickey went home and took a triple hit of adapin - 150 mg - to calm his nerves and fell asleep watching Three Stooges reruns on the cable channel.

Waking late in the afternoon to the muffled sounds of oriental music, he staggered out of bed and peaked through the living room blinds. The Butt family was having a cookout. Mearadey was mooning over a muscular oriental with shoulder-length hair. Meanwhile, an admiring crowd had gathered around the skeletal shed. They pawed at the rough-cut wood, kicked at the sole plate. A young boy hoisted himself up through the naked window opening and hung upside down like a monkey from the top sill.

In a chaise lounge 50 feet away sat the master of ceremonies, stone-faced Mr. Butt. His wife was moving back and forth among the guests with a tray of drinks. But for the difference in ages, Mrs. Butt and Rasmei could have passed for identical twins. She had the same squat physique - face as flat as a Mekong Delta rice paddy, the broad, ill-defined nose thrown on as an afterthought.

The rear door opened. Rasmei, dressed in dungaree shorts and a plaid blouse emerged with a platter of hors d’oeuvres. A man, fortyish and heavyset with dark-rimmed glasses, immediately approached and began following the girl about the yard like an obedient, well-trained dog.

Mickey went to the hall closet, rummaged around and emerged with a pair of high-powered binoculars. In the bathroom, he sat on the toilet and lifted the blind a fraction of an inch. Rasmei and the heavyset man were gone. Vanished. Mrs. Butt was bending down to offer her husband a drink. The lens blurred. Pulling back a half turn on the adjusting knob, husband and wife eased into sharp focus. Mr. Butt accepted a glass of pink liquid and, as the portly, middle-aged woman turned away, his features softened, dissolved like wet, potter’s clay spun on a wheel.

“Damn!” Mickey wrenched the lenses away from his eyes. Had the man smiled - ecstatically, with unrestrained joy - or was his medicated mind playing tricks? Either way, the sight of Mr. Butt showing strong affection was more than he could stomach. Mickey went into the other room. He took his clothes off, climbed into bed and pulled the covers up over his head.

*****

Later that night, Rasmei appeared with a bag of food. “Where’s your sister?” Mickey asked.

“Went on a date.” She brought the food into the kitchen, placed the bag on the table and began opening the containers. “Shanghai rice cakes,” she pointed to a pale white, doughy dish. On a separate dish she arranged mint, cucumber, fresh lettuce, bean sprouts, noodles, peanut milk and soft rolls.

Mickey sniffed the mild aroma. “I ate something similar in country.”

She went to the refrigerator, cracked open a beer and placed it on the table next to him. “Bee Boong,” she indicated the second container… it’s a traditional Vietnamese dish.” Rasmei surveyed the room. Empty beer cans, four and five deep now, fanned out the length of the counter; a week’s worth of Brandenburg Gazette newspapers littered the floor near the back door. “The pigs in my former village had cleaner personal habits.”

“Yes, but could they build a storage shed?”

She grinned but then, just as quickly, the humor faded. “We had a barbecue today and a man asked me to marry him.” Rasmei tossed the words out in an offhand manner. “For the third time.”

Mickey rubbed the rim of the bottle, sipping at the foam. “I assume you refused on both, previous occasions.” Rasmei responded with a hollow smile. “Why did you compare me to your father the other day?” he asked.

She sat down across from him and removed a beer can from the arm of a chair. Liquid had seeped through the finish to the porous wood below leaving yet another soiled ring. “You’re both so mistrustful.”

“Which tells me nothing,” Mickey said.

The sun had set, all the color - reds, blues, yellows and grainy purples - washed out of the evening sky. Through the open window, they could hear the screams and catcalls of the neighbor’s children, cannonballing off the deck of their above-ground pool. With the light almost completely gone, the mother begged them, for the hundredth time, to come in for the night. Her request precipitated a fresh outburst of hoots and jeers, sending small bodies catapulting into the darkened water. Rasmei glanced at Mickey and looked away. “And you’re both so angry.”

*****

Sunday they installed windows.

Because it was only a storage shed, there was no reason to insulate the rough openings. Mearadey was gone - quit without notice. Off somewhere with the new boyfriend. Rasmei had discarded her clumsy, wooden hammer for Mickey’s steel-shanked Estwing with the 13-inch throw. By now she had learned to let the weighty tool do the work, the power coming from the shoulder rather than her slender wrist.

Whack. Whack. Whack. With three, arcing blows, she set the finished nails flush against the coarse wood. “On the world news last night they reported more fighting in my homeland. People fleeing north to the Tai border.”

Mickey was fastening the decorative trim to the left door panel with sheet rock screws. He bent down and positioned the screw gun over the head of a black screw. There was a whirring burst of noise and the decorative white-trimmed pine tightened neatly against the plywood panel. “The bastards can’t leave well enough alone.”

They hung the other door, installed the latch and stood back to admire the roofless building. “For the crosspiece,” Mickey pointed to an imaginary midpoint where the newly-formed doors came together, “we’ll go up a couple of feet with scrap lumber, then run a transverse beam. That’ll provide enough pitch.”

They cut 12 roof joists, angling the near ends to butt up against the crossbeam while the lower portion bedded comfortably in a notch on the top sill. “What about Mr. Persistence?” Mickey asked. Rasmei looked at him with a dull expression. “The fellow who’s dying to marry you.”

“Not my type,” she said without further elaboration.

Mickey removed his tool belt and threw it aside. “That’s enough for today.” He started to collect the smaller tools throwing them into the toolbox. “We’ll cover the roof and lay shingles next weekend and your shed will be finished.

*****

For two weeks it rained throughout the weekend. The shed’s bare walls and flooring soaked up the moisture and dried out only to be repeatedly drenched. A relentless, unforgiving drizzle was beating down on the roofless shed. The structure reminded Mickey of a fetus, a half-formed, embryo which, in less than a month’s time, would come to full term. The Butt family, he mused, would store their riding lawnmower and gardening supplies, their bicycles, wheelbarrow and god-knows what else in the spacious, new shed. With every tool and trinket, they would become less like their fratricidal countrymen and more like ordinary Americans. Whatever the hell that meant!

“What should we do about the shed?” Rasmei’s voice on the phone sounded pinched, worried.

It was eight o’clock in the morning. Now, even on the off days when she wasn’t bringing over the little white boxes, the house smelled like a Chinese noodle factory. “How’d you get my number?”

“You’re in the book.”

He could hear the oriental inflection - the clipped and brittle precision of English spoken as a second language - in the disembodied voice. “The plywood’s held together with waterproof glue. Rain won’t affect anything.”

After an uncomfortable pause, she said, “What are you doing?”

Mickey was standing barefoot in his underwear. “Now?”

“No, a week from Tuesday.”

Her pokerfaced brusqueness stood him back on his heels. No one ever called much before noon; the clattering telephone had jolted him out of a comatose fog. “Nothing. I’m talking to you.”

“Why do you dress like every day is Halloween?”

Mickey took a deep breath; for a brief moment, he considered hanging up the phone, peeing his brains out, and going back to bed. “In Vietnam I was a lowly grunt… spent three years in light infantry. Mortars mostly. Short range, high trajectory crap. For thirty-six months I slaughtered people at a polite distance.” Mickey paused just long enough for her to tell him to shut up. He cracked his knuckles and farted. “Putting the war behind me has become like a quest for the Holy Grail.”

“Holy what?”

His kidneys were beginning to ache with backpressure from a swollen bladder. “The cup used by Christ during the Last Supper.”

There was no reply. “The punji stick,” he offered, as though speaking in cryptic code. “I got poked and shit on overseas then came home to more of the same. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Tomorrow, if the rain ends, I will teach you how to cut and lay shingles. If the restaurant business ever goes bust, you can always earn a living as a roofer.”

“Well, goodbye.” She hung up.

*****

Sunday afternoon Mickey’s sister dropped by unannounced. He was in the bedroom hanging wallpaper, all the furniture pushed against the far wall. “Ten years you never lift a finger to fix anything, and now you’re doing major renovations?”

Mickey dampened a sponge in a pail of clear water and dabbed at a loose seam. “Do you like the pattern?”

Two walls were done in a garish metallic plum with mint stripes. Karla ran a hand over the textured paper. “Very classy.”

Mickey rolled a precut sheet with the paste side facing out and went into the bathroom. He wet the paper in the tub, boxing the ends toward the middle. “You wouldn’t believe what this stuff costs retail.”

She followed him back into the bedroom. Mickey stood on a step ladder and raised the sheet into place while his sister unfurled it from below. “A contractor I know got the bid to renovate twenty-five rooms at the Ramada Inn.” Mickey slid the wet paper an eighth of an inch closing the seam. Grabbing a short bristle brush, he began smoothing out the air bubbles and excess paste, working from the center in sweeping strokes. “The guy never was much good with a pencil and paper. Miscalculated two rooms over.”

Mickey knelt down to trim the bulge around an electrical box. “You’re papering the house with leftovers from a motel?” Karla said.

Mickey waved a utility knife in the air. “The Ramada Inn’s a 4-star joint; they don’t scrimp on furnishings.” He ran a crimping wheel along the baseboard and peeled back the excess. Reaching for the brush again, he tapped the bottom edge neatly into place. “Did you see the living room?”

Karla went back into the living room and reexamined the paper, a floral motif offset by a rococo border. “Swanky, very elegant,” she confirmed. “If I didn’t know any better, I might think you were either experiencing a midlife crisis or in love.”

Mickey ran his tape measure across the length of the far wall marking the bare plaster every twenty-one inches. Seven more sheets and, except for the mismatched furniture, there would be no appreciable difference between his frumpy bedroom and a 75 dollar-a-night suite at the Ramada Inn!

“Those Cambodian girls sure proved you wrong,” Karla said. She was standing by the window, staring into the rain-soaked neighbor’s yard.

Mickey was on his knees. He placed a framing square flush against the side of a fresh roll and trimmed straight across with the utility knife. “Yeah well, who knows. The first good winter storm, the shed might still blow over.”

He retracted the blade and joined her by the window. A relentless downpour was punishing the roofless shed. “Two million,” Mickey muttered.

“How’s that?”

“One fifth of the Cambodian population. Two million men, women and children… that’s how many people the Khmer Rouge killed in four, shitty years.” He touched his finger to the misted window and traced a circle then split the middle with a curved line into yin-yang symbols. “No hostile, invading enemy. No civil war. Just a bunch of genocidal gooks killing each other for no good reason.”

Karla stared at her brother in mild surprise. “I didn’t know you cared?”

“It’s no skin off my ass if they slaughter two or twenty million.

“Still,” Karla said, “it’s a nice looking shed.”

*****

When she was gone, Mickey pushed all the furniture against the opposite wall and finished the bedroom. He swept the scraps into a trash bag, washed the floor with a pair of torn boxer shorts, and put the tools away. In the kitchen he dialed a faded number taped to the wall above the telephone.

“Pick up or delivery?” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“Pickup,” Mickey said. “Number two special.”

“One Mexican pizza with hot chili peppers, hamburger, refried beans, diced tomatoes, cheese -”

“Ten minutes,” Mickey interrupted, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

After supper, Mickey set the bedroom back in order. He showered and changed into a pair of light-colored Docker slacks and a pea-green sports shirt with a crest on the pocket, a present from Karla on his 43rd birthday. He had never worn the shirt before.

In the bedroom, he lit a cone of sandalwood incense and watched as a wispy plume of chalky smoke curled toward the ceiling. On the bedroom dresser, he laid out a fistful of diazepam tablets with the distinctive V-shaped design. White, yellow, blue. Placing a blue, 10 mg pill under his tongue, he brushed the remaining pills back into the drawer and flicked the stereo on to 89.7 fm, WGBH. In a mournful legato, Sarah Vaughn was crooning Misty, bending and reharmonizing the tones in ways that only she could comprehend. Sucking in his gut, he stood in front of the full-length closet mirror.

Twenty years. Though the war ended two decades earlier, Mickey was trying to reach even further back, to retrieve some memory of how things felt before the mortars and madness. By the second chorus, the tranquilizer kicked in. The music, sweetly-scented sandalwood, and plum-colored wallpaper all conspired to lull him back through a narrow slip of a chronology while outside the sheeting rain continued with the same unbroken intensity.

Look at me.
I’m as helpless
as a kitten up a tree…

Psycho. The Bates Motel. In 1960, Mickey and a fellow sixth grader snuck into the Brandenburg Cinema to watch Janet Leigh strip down to her ivory slip. During the shower scene, Mickey dropped his head between his knees and simply waited out the ensuing horror. He visited the movie for Ms Leigh’s milky thighs and a hint of cleavage, not the slash and gore.

On my own,
would I wander
through this wonderland alone ...

Rubic’s cubes, dashikis, spam and eggs, Daisy, pump-action bb rifles, Jade East cologne for men. Shoes with stiffened tongues in lieu of laces - tongues which slid back and forth on wire rails. After only a year or two, the style fell out of vogue. Maypo cereal. Brylcream (just a little dab’ll do ya). Bell bottom dungarees. Muumuus and tie-dyed shirts. Crook rum-soaked cigars. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown and Bill Haley and the Comets (or was that earlier?).

Church. An altar boy through junior high, Mickey carried the cross; he held the heavy book as the priest read the convocational prayers, even rang the silver bell during Mass.

never knowing my right hand
from my left,
my hat from my glove,
I get misty or too much in love.


When the song ended, Mickey went into the bathroom and filled the sink with hot water. He washed and lathered his face. Twice. With an abandoned, old-fashioned double-edged razor that predated his nostalgia, he shaved his beard.

*****

On Saturday they worked into the early afternoon covering the roof and stapling a protective layer of tarpaper over the bare plywood. Mickey slit open a bundle of gray shingles. Trimming the bottom flaps off several sheets with a utility knife, he nailed the first shingles to the lip of the overhang. Then he showed Rasmei how to alternate rows so the slits formed a broken line leading to the peak. “I’ll snap chalk lines on the tar paper so you can see what you’re doing.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“You’re fine; it’s the shitty shingles I don’t trust.” He climbed the ladder and threw a 40-pound bag on the pitched surface. Five hours later Rasmei ran a cap across the peak and the shed was finished.

“At Sherwin Williams next to the YMCA, get the top grade, opaque stain,” Mickey said. “Any color that matches the house. Two gallons. Tell them I sent you and they’ll charge it to my account and give you the contractor’s discount.” He blew his nose on a handkerchief that had seen better days. “Now tell me why your father never smiles.”

Rasmei scowled and folded her hands in her lap. “On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge invaded Phom Penh and drove the entire population into the countryside. We took only what we could carry, some gold and jewelry. In a village 25 miles north near Prek Po my mother died of dysentery. Father, a school teacher, was forced into slave labor, harvesting rice seven days a week. We had very little food and people were disappearing, being relocated, every so many months.

“During the monsoon season, the earth became soaked and began spitting up the bodies of the murdered - political prisoners, school teachers, businessmen, woman and children. It was as though, denied a proper Buddhist burial, their immortal souls were swimming through the muck to reunite with loved ones. Of course, we, the living, knew better. Cambodia was one huge concentration camp, the killing fields everywhere.”

“Old news.” Mickey said gruffly. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“A year passed. So many men had died, there were two, perhaps three, women for every man. One day a neery, a female soldier, came to my father and said, ‘You shall be my husband.’ My father was horrified. The neery was filthy. She could neither read nor write. An AK-47 slung over her shoulder, she smelled like a dung heap. But as a Khmer Rouge fighter, she could choose anyone for a spouse. To deny her meant almost certain death.”

“An unimaginable nightmare. After losing all our worldly possessions and watching my mother waste away, my father was now being forced to marry his tormentor! An unwashed, jungle-bred neery… my future stepmother.

“A month past and a group wedding was arranged. Fifty couples - some willing, others less than enthused about their prospective mates. The day following his second marriage, my father feasted on a bowl of rice gruel spiced with python meat before going back into the paddies.”

“No rest for the downtrodden,” Mickey quipped.

“A month after they were married, the war in the East heated up and my father’s new bride was sent to do battle with the Viet Cong. We never saw or heard from her again. When the Vietnamese liberated our village, we fled to safety in Thailand and then to America.”

“And the neery?” Mickey asked

Rasmei shook her head. “Dead or hiding in the jungle with the remnant of Pol Pot’s defeated army.”

“Who was the woman sitting next to your father in the car the other day?”

“My mother’s sister. Her husband died during the reign of terror. She fled the country with us after the war; my father thought it only fitting that, to honor the dead, they spend the rest of their mortal lives together.”

“Your father’s a bigamist.”

“Polygamy, she bristled, “was an accepted practice among the rich and upper classes in Cambodia for many centuries. And, anyway, I doubt the neery, even if she were still alive, would contest my father’s third marriage.”

“Which explains why he never smiles.”

Rasmei shook her head gently up and down. “If you’d been through such an experience, would you?”

*****

They were sitting on the peak of the newly finished roof looking out over a half acre of wild flowers and straw-colored grass. Previously a cow pasture, the land lay fallow for several years, the only regular tenant a fat ground hog which emerged at dusk to feed. As the sun slouched toward the horizon, they could feel the heat streaming off the fresh shingles.

A coffee can half filled with stubby roofing nails lay on the roof between them. Rasmei emptied the nails into the pouch on her cloth apron - the same one Mearadey had abandoned - and tossed the can to the ground. “My father bought a new washing machine,” Rasmei said. “A Whirlpool. Dual speed, eight cycles. It even has a hand washable setting for silk and delicate fabrics.”

“Obviously, you studied the owner’s manual.”

“My stepmother doesn’t read English, and Mearadey is too scatterbrained to be trusted with laundry. She mixes whites with darker clothes that aren’t color-safe.”

“There must be a reason you’re telling me this,” he said.

“Near our prison village was a small river. My mother washed clothes, beating them on a flat stone.” The muscles around her mouth twitched sharply but her voice remained even. “It’s the last memory I have of her before she died.” Rasmei sighed and didn’t speak again for several minutes. “Take me out somewhere.”

Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “On a date?”

“Ashamed to be seen with an oriental?”

“I don’t go anywhere. I’ve no social life.”

“Saturday afternoon you go off.”

Mickey laughed, making a derisive snuffling sound that hardly reached to his lips. “I bike two miles down the road to Brandenburg Center. At the Bagels and Cream Delicatessen, I order the luncheon special and a medium coffee. Then I sit in the park and contemplate my navel.” He didn’t bother to tell her about the Maui-wowi.

“It was just a thought,” she said with a tart brevity that brought closure to the issue.

Fifty feet away in the field, there was a disturbance. Near a white dogwood tree, the high grass was thrashing fitfully in the opposite direction to a stiff breeze. A clump of blue columbine shuddered and suddenly dropped from sight like a plastic bobber dragged under by a large fish. Mickey put his hand over hers and squeezed the palm. “If you’re up for it, how about gourmet coffee and an assortment of New York style bagels?” he said just as the ground hog waddled into view from behind a thorny tangle of purple-throated jimsonweed and loganberries.

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