Butterfly Yellow Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of

  the unknowable number of refugees

  at the bottom of the sea

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part I: The Road

  Brittle Brown Ocean

  Summer 1981

  Hằng

  Horseshoe Mustache

  The Panhandle

  Rhinestone Cowboy

  Giraffe Made of Metal

  The Others

  Kindness From the Stomach Out

  Cold Ginger Ale

  Red Line Across Pale Throat

  Nót Me-Sì-Quýt

  Spiky Memories

  Tattoos

  Musky Wildness

  Washed Bones

  Nice-Guy Burden

  Glass-Whip

  Poem

  Rich Blood Beneath Glossy Skin

  Part II: The Ranch

  Silhouette and Spy

  Trouble

  Eyeing a Mirror

  Fuzzy Mix

  Midnight Rodeo

  Slow Bumpy Ride

  The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

  Memories on the Tongue

  Pushy Uncle

  Truth to Tell

  Skin Peeling Off Bones

  Swells of Saliva

  Real Deal

  Once Was Eleven

  Cute

  Too Intense

  Ice Pebbles

  Upper Arm Against Hers

  Smooth Lullaby of Buzzes

  Lighter Gray

  The Island

  Sappiness

  The Cave

  Each Inhale, Each Exhale

  The Worms

  Someday

  Part III: The Butterfly

  Inside a Face

  Bướm Vàng

  The Horrid and the Sublime

  Silence

  Surprise

  H & L

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Thanhhà Lại

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  The Road

  Brittle Brown Ocean

  On the bus, Hằng stares into the endless expanse. She concentrates on even inhales, then slow exhales. Nibbling on ginger, she’s determined to soothe the relentless stirrings of nausea as her intestines coil into eels.

  Fiery ginger flashes down and quiets the eels. She sharpens her stare. Having flown in from a refugee camp yesterday, she’s already on her way to A-ma-ri-lo. Never mind that her inner clock still clicks thirteen hours ahead. Never mind that her uncle will be chasing her. Never mind that she can barely speak English and can understand only half of a sentence.

  The other passengers spit out words in a hissy, snaky language. How they talk, and sing and hum, and eat, how they eat. An explosion of cheer and chemicals: sweet, tangy, salty, bubbly, crispy, oniony. None of it helps her nausea.

  They must see her as strange. A jagged-hair girl cocooned in long sleeves, heavy pants. Meanwhile they dress for the beach. This, despite vents blowing such frigid air Hằng senses fog in her breaths.

  She sits by herself and marvels at a land so flat it erases the horizon, presenting a brittle brown ocean instead of glassy blue green. Still, the same vastness, the same unknown.

  Each bounce on the bus recalls bobbing on a boat. Hằng bites off a chunk of ginger. Chomps into searing bitterness. Anything to stop memories of her escape by sea.

  Summer 1981

  A boy of eighteen, self-renamed LeeRoy that very morning, is driving past the same dry expanse. Here and there, scraggly mesquites break up the blanket of brown. Enough heat out there to scorch every tree into kindling. Sitting in air-conditioning, he whistles, having waited all his life to reach this open plain where a man can get at his true self.

  LeeRoy has driven up from Austin, from his home in the Hill Country where rolling green slopes don’t stand a chance against the allure of dusty cowboy country. His confused parents, UT professors, have been told not to expect him back for a good long while. It took more than a month after graduation to skedaddle, his folks inventing one reason or another to hold on to him. A party, a family trip to Big Ben, opening weekend for Indiana Jones, then an all-out Fourth of July barbecue last night.

  This morning LeeRoy finally headed out for the Lone Star, a honky-tonk in Amarillo where his idol, Bruce Ford, will be making a splash.

  Summer 1981, Bruce Ford has been the NFR bareback champion two years running. In his prime at twenty-nine, he sits on an incensed bronco like he’s on a swing. True, LeeRoy has never met Ford, but he’s absorbed everything about this man, beginning three years ago when Ford won the PRCA season championship.

  It’s understood that cowboys don’t take kindly to hangers-on. At a party though, where Ford will likely have a few beers and loosen up, LeeRoy is betting the champ will spare his number-one fan a portion of his time. LeeRoy plans on approaching Mr. Ford and offering up free labor. Mucking, grooming, cooldowns. Hell, LeeRoy might as well dream big and imagine his tag-a-long turning into a real job, putting him front and center in Oklahoma City when the man himself will defend his title come December.

  Hằng

  That same morning, using halting English aided by scratchy illustrations, Hằng persuaded her cousin En-Di (illogically spelled “Angie”) to risk her own father’s fury and drive her to the bus station. She gestured a story that her brother is distraught and waiting for her. It’s been six years, two months, and fifteen days since April 20, 1975, when the siblings got separated.

  Hằng did not need to explain that retrieving her brother equated to her life’s singular focus. Every twitch in her face said it for her.

  “Really? Your brother knows you’re coming? Dad would never let you go. But then he says no to everything. You have to do this alone? He’s going to be livid, and I guess I can say you insisted and cried and were going to drive off and wreck my Mustang. And you’re eighteen, you should be able to go off by yourself, I certainly will be out of here in two years. You are eighteen?”

  Hằng nodded, uncertain which question she was answering. The more Hằng nodded, the more En-Di started packing shorts and tank tops and T-shirts. She was puzzled when Hằng insisted on pants and long-sleeved shirts, but sure, she had those too. Even gave away sixty dollars saved for a dance contest. As a final touch, En-Di stuffed everything into a bag with straps. An ingenious invention, as the straps clung to Hằng’s shoulders and settled the weight on her back. As if she were carrying air.

  As she drove, En-Di spilled forth an ever higher mountain of words.

  “Be careful out there, don’t make eye contact with nobody. You have to do this, right? Dad’s going to be heartbroken. He gave out cupcakes at work when we got word months ago that you made it to a refugee camp. Are you sure you can’t wait for my dad to take you? You haven’t even gotten a haircut. Honestly, you need one, bad. You haven’t even been here a whole day. I’ll fib to Dad when he gets off the overnight that you’re sick in your room and can’t be bothered. Oh, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you call yourself Moon, you said that’s what Hằng means anyway.”

  Understanding half the words is more than enough, because when En-Di talks her voice acts, her hands dance. But no matter how well-meaning the suggestion, Hằng won’t be switching to Moon as though she were a hippie with oily hair and a long skirt and a tambourine, as she’s seen in National Geographic.

  Before driving off, En-Di shouted a last advice: “No offense, but you look about twelve to Texans, they’re just big folks. See if you can get a child’s ticket. They’ll go for it. Remember, your name is Moon, and if anyone
asks say your hippie parents let you travel alone. This is one big adventure.”

  Hằng doesn’t believe in adventures. There are steps that must be done, and once done, another step awaits. The last step, after six years of minute planning by her grandmother, is a bus ride away. In A-ma-ri-lo her baby brother has to be waiting. In her imaginings, he is always waiting. She plans to lunge at him and squeeze chubby gooey flesh. His coarse hair will thrill her skin, the salty heat of him will cushion her nostrils.

  Her brother is the only person left from her youth. Grandmother gone, Father gone, Mother gone. Hằng never would have crossed the sea on a rotting fishing boat if he weren’t waiting for her. It has taken too many years, but finally, since landing here yesterday, the two of them are enveloped in the same landscape and the same heat.

  The bus continues rocking as she keeps hugging the shoulder-strap bag. The ginger is nibbled to a nub. Now acclimated, every fiery scrape releases sparkles of moss and rain. Flames that had singed her taste buds now glide down sweet and velvety, soothing the bus-sick eels.

  A highway sign states Amarillo—60 miles, which Hằng instinctively recalculates to 96 kilometers. A tingle begins in her toes; her cheekbones lift. This, despite a distrust of hope.

  Horseshoe Mustache

  LeeRoy drums his right palm on the steering wheel. Something called rap, just hitting the mainstream with Blondie’s “Rapture.” His cousin has included “That’s the Joint” by Funky 4 + 1 in a mix tape sent for graduation. Living in the Bronx, the cousin always introduces LeeRoy to the latest. This kicking new sound is between singing and talking, with bass and maybe drums, while the words rhyme to a rhythm like hyped-up disco. A girl’s voice and at least three boys’. LeeRoy can’t make out all the lyrics. Still, it’s damn fun.

  We’re gonna hum hum hum that we’re real,

  We’re gonna hum hum hum we know the real deal.

  In between drumming LeeRoy twirls the ends of his horseshoe mustache, grown in tribute to Bruce Ford’s signature look. His is red while Ford’s glows a sunny blond. But some things can’t be helped.

  He listens hard and gets the next two lines.

  The lyrics make him happy, and when he’s happy he likes sweets. His parents sent him off with a pint of milk and a pan of brownies, cut into nine squares. He’s gotten into five.

  The sixth piece calls for cold milk.

  The Panhandle

  Texas is shaped like a huge iron skillet. By elementary school, every child has learned that its protruding northwestern tip is called the Panhandle. Yet Hằng has never heard of the pan, much less its handle.

  She does know about Texas, had long been told that her father’s younger brother is a doctor in Dallas. Two S-shaped Vietnams can snuggle inside Texas’s skillet, yet the small country has four times the state’s population. No wonder Hằng has ridden for hours and stared into nothing but white-blue sky, a forever brown, and an assault of billboards: on one Repent or Live Forever After in Damnation, on another three cowboys tame a horse under the headline ACME THE REAL WEST, then a close-up of a sizzling steak.

  Hằng wonders who would eat a bleeding slab of meat the size of a thigh? And why are Clint Eastwood and his cool cold stare not on any of the billboards?

  Back home she thought cowboys would roam this world, kicking up clouds of dust as they sped by on horses. When she tried to escape with her brother near the end of the war, she planned on coming here, learning to tame wild mustangs and surprising their father.

  It shocks her that six years ago she was that naive and silly. For years she and her brother watched cowboy movies with their father. Those humid evenings sunken into tick-ticks from the projector, as film reels looped and looped. They were entranced to have Clint Eastwood flicker on the living room wall, his tough-man mumbles squeezing through lips opened to a sliver. From the cowboy’s hisses their father taught her English while her little brother practiced hissing.

  Her father never said, but Hằng knew, if Việt Nam had cowboys he would have given up his translation job and put on working boots. He could talk just like them. And manage the heat. In every scene cowboys hid from the sun in wide hats, blanket coats, tough pants, and suffocating boots, all the while tugging at sweat-stained handkerchiefs protecting their throats. The men couldn’t have smelled too good. Soaked underneath, sun-cracked on the surface.

  Hằng is on her way to the one address she knows in this land: 405 Mesquite Street, Amarillo, Texas.

  In the final days of the war in April 1975, Hằng thought she was so clever, devising a way to flee while her family strategized and worried. Every day newspapers printed stories about Americans panicking to save hundreds of orphans. There was even an official name, Operation Babylift. She assumed she and her brother would go first, then somehow her family would join them in America. But in line at the airport she was rejected, a twelve-year-old passing as eight. Linh was five, three to foreign eyes, just young enough to be accepted as an orphan. Hằng saw little Linh thrashing as he was carried into a Pan Am.

  By the time her brother was ripped from her, nobody cared to hear why she lied. With so many scrambling to flee before the victorious Communists marched in, one more screaming child was just that. An American volunteer with puffy, sweaty hands must have felt sorry for her. He pressed a card into her palm as he pushed her away from the ladder. Sun rays radiated through each strand of his mango-colored hair. She had to stop an impulse to extinguish the fiery puff of gold threads on his head. He was the last to board. Hằng screamed until the Pan Am blended into the sky and left a long loose-curl cloud. For hours, until dusk enveloped her and mosquitoes chased her home, she focused skyward and pleaded for forgiveness. When she opened her palm, the card had disintegrated except for one clue: 405 Mesquite Street, Amarillo, Texas.

  Returning home that day, she faced her grandmother with a confession sinking down her tongue. Upon hearing the first three words, “Em mất rồi,” he is gone, Bà immediately puckered her lips as if biting a lemon and was helpless against the red rimming around her eyes. After a long lumpy exhale, she concluded her grandson had been kidnapped.

  Only Hằng, her mother, and Bà remained in the house after the war. They were told her father had been killed shortly before the winning north rolled their tanks into the southern capital. Her mother sank into bed and stayed. But Bà, vowing they would not become a house of weeping women, wrote down the beginning of hundreds of steps needed to reclaim her grandson. First, they must save money. Next, they must write to her uncle in Dallas, telling him to go to the address.

  Hằng never corrected Bà’s assumption. During the day, as Bà clicked her nails and plotted, Hằng could pretend innocence. After all, Bà did not ask, how did they get to the airport? Were there other children? Who thought he was an orphan? Why didn’t Hằng scratch, bite, and scream to keep her brother beside her? It was so easy to stay quiet as Bà provided herself with answers.

  But while crickets sang and Bà snored beside her, the lie streaked through Hằng’s blood and deposited ashy guilt inside every crevice. The gray guilt had grown heavy, refusing to pause its relentless infusion into her joints and marrow. After all, it was her fault her brother was taken.

  Rhinestone Cowboy

  Stopping to get milk, LeeRoy gets out and adjusts his hat in the driver’s mirror. He figures he did mighty fine turning himself into a cowboy.

  As part of the graduation package, where the vehicle had to be a Ford F-350 in a shout-out to Bareback Ford and the generous eight-foot truck bed converted to a covered sleeper, his parents followed exact instructions: Texas-style white felt hat, two checkered button-downs with silver buttons, Wrangler jeans starched until white lines run down the legs, bumpy ostrich-skin boots in oxblood. Best of all, dark leather chaps with fringes. He is wearing everything but the chaps. Those are sitting in their box, to be anointed when he rides his first bronc.

  Add to all that something that can’t be bought and would horrify his parents if they knew:
his grandpop’s bareback buckle, won at some down-and-out rodeo where ribs were shattered and an arm was yanked clear out of its socket. That last ride also brought on a crushed right knee that had LeeRoy’s grandfather walking up and down for the rest of his days. LeeRoy doesn’t feel he deserves to hook on the bronze prize until he’s held on past eight seconds and hollered out his grandfather’s name, Roy.

  LeeRoy’s parents had branded him with a birth name no child should have to endure: Leslie Dwight Cooper. He shivers thinking of the mess boys in playgrounds had made from “Leslie,” without knowledge of “Dwight.” Since junior high, he’s been Lee. This morning he bunched Lee to Roy and gave himself some on-the-road gumption.

  In the parking lot he overhears four cowboys talking about heading to the Lone Star honky-tonk.

  “Howdy, y’all aim to sneak in a handshake with Mr. Ford himself?”

  They stare, looking him up and down. One of them sneers right in his face. “What are ya, some kind of rhinestone cowboy?”

  LeeRoy evens up his voice before answering, “Enjoy your day.” ’Course it stung, but his mother always said if it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter. He’s got a vision for the summer, and he’ll be damned if some good ol’ boys are going to best him.

  There’s always another place to buy milk.

  Giraffe Made of Metal

  A maroon car with white stripes slices in front of the bus. Hằng’s gut arches, flooding her throat with a one-egg breakfast. Her uncle drives such a car. Face bloated, voice loud, he might have finished overnight work and already be in pursuit. She attacks more ginger.

  Bà has trained her to believe in ginger the way others rely on pills, curing everything from nausea to anxiety, stomach cramps to head throbs. Better than pills: Bà reasoned that ginger is always within reach—in a porch pot or at the open market. Hằng realizes Bà could not imagine a world without fresh ginger. But then lately, there have been so many unknowns that even Bà, the most practical, focused, even-hearted planner she knows, could not have predicted.