The Fourth Watcher

9

"H e’s just a bully.” They are in bed again, but the glow they shared an hour earlier is a fading memory. Rafferty’s fury, however, is still very much alive.

“He’s a government,” Rose says. The sky has paled during the time it took him to talk her into trying to get some rest. Early light leaks balefully through the gaps in the tape over the space around the window air conditioner. Rose gives the new day the look she reserves for uninvited visitors and follows her train of thought. “Worse, with those policemen along, he’s two governments. I may not have written a bunch of books, Poke, but I know you don’t punch a government.”

“I didn’t punch him.” He can’t bring himself to tell her what Elson said to provoke the aborted attack. “And I’m not the one who told him to go get laid.”

“He needs it,” Rose says.

“I don’t think so. He probably jerks off to a spreadsheet.”

“What mean ‘jerk off’?” Rose asks, reverting to pidgin. “Same-same ‘beef jerky’?” She takes another drag on the cigarette and hits the filter. “He has very bad energy,” she says in Thai. “He likes power too much. He needs to spend some time in a monastery. And you should have been more careful. You should have kept a cool heart.”

“He had it coming. His behavior was, as they say, ‘inappropriate.’ ” He uses the English word because he can’t think of a Thai equivalent.

“What does that mean?” Rose lights a new cigarette off her old one, not a good sign. That was the way she smoked when he met her.

“ ‘Inappropriate’ is government talk.” He slides the ashtray closer to her so she can stub the butt. The stink of burning filter fills the room. “It means someone has fucked up on a planetary scale. When an American congressman is videotaped in bed with a fourteen-year-old male poodle, his behavior is usually described as inappropriate.”

“Fourteen is old for a dog,” Rose observes.

“Gee, and I thought you weren’t listening.”

“I’m listening, Poke. I’m even thinking.” She shifts her back against the pillow propped behind her. The cloud of smoke she exhales is penetrated in a vaguely religious fashion by the invading fingers of light, good morning from Cecil B. DeMille. “This could be very bad for us.”

“Oh, relax. It’s not like you and Peachy are printing money in the basement. Today they’ll go to the bank where she got the bills, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Maybe.” She pulls the sheet up over her shoulders as though she is cold.

“Sure it will. It was an accident. Bad luck, that’s all.”

She does not reply. But then she shakes her head and says, “Luck.”

He slides his knuckles softly up her arm. “Okay, it’s not luck, it’s a kink in somebody’s karma. Worse comes to worst, you have to replace the counterfeit junk with real bills. Come on, Rose. It’s only money.”

She does not look impressed by the insight.

It didn’t cheer you up either, Rafferty thinks, and then, pop, he’s got something he’s sure will distract her. “Listen, did I ever tell you that it was money that first made me want to come to Asia?”

“Really.” She takes a drag and blows the smoke away from him. “I thought you came here because you were destined to meet me.”

“Ah, but destiny moves in strange ways.” He laces his fingers together on top of his chest and lets his head sink into the pillow, his eyes on her profile. “In my case it was money. When I was a kid.”

Now he gets the full gaze that always makes his spine tingle. “You never talk about when you were little.”

“Well, I am now. You want to hear about it?”

“Of course.” She gives him the first smile he has seen since Elson drove his snowplow through their evening. “Since it’s my job to help you become human.”

“My father. .” he begins. Then he falters. Rose’s own father has been dead only two months, and he knows she is still grieving.

“Your father,” she says. She is silent for a moment, and he searches her face, ready to wrap his arms around her. But then she says, “Something else you never talk about.”

“That’s right,” he says, trying to sidestep the moment. “When you don’t hear me talking, it’s probably my father I’m not talking about. Anyway, he spent a long time in Asia before I was born. Ran away when he was fifteen.” He thinks about it for a second. “He was sort of a specialist at running away.”

“Fifteen? How do you run away to Asia when you’re fifteen?”

“Do you want to hear about the money or not?”

“First things first.”

In general, Rafferty would rather eat glass than discuss his father, but now that he’s opened the box, there doesn’t seem to be any graceful way to close it. “He had a fake driver’s license, and he used it to get a passport. Things weren’t so tight in those days. He’d saved a bunch of money from mowing lawns and. . I don’t know, whatever kids did in those days.”

“He told you this?”

“I asked him. He wasn’t much on volunteering information.”

She puts out the cigarette and doesn’t light another, which Rafferty interprets as progress. “Why did he run away?”

“Carrots,” Rafferty says. “Or anyway, carrots were the last straw, so to speak. The inciting incident, as a writer would say. My father hated carrots, especially cooked carrots. When my father was thirteen, my grandmother died, and my grandfather married a woman my father didn’t like. She was probably okay; she was only in her early twenties, and I’m sure she was doing the best she could, but it wasn’t good enough for him. Just like my mother. She wasn’t good enough either.”

Rose puts her hand on his. “And here you are, trying to build a family.”

“Do you want to hear the story or not?”

“I’d be holding my breath if I weren’t smoking,” Rose says, pulling out a new Marlboro Light.

“Well, he’d been planning to leave since my grandfather remarried, but he had to wait until he looked old enough to get his passport. So he got it, and one day he came in for lunch, and in front of him was a steaming platter of cooked carrots.” He looks over at her. “Are you really interested in this?”

She waves the match until it gives up and then blows on it for good measure. “Don’t be silly. This is your family you’re talking about.”

“Okay. The carrots. He shoved the platter away, and his stepmother said something like, ‘Eat those carrots. There are children starving in China.’ ” He can feel Rose’s gaze, and he says, “Americans used to say that when their kids wouldn’t eat. To make them feel guilty about those poor little Chinese kids, I guess. Anyway, that was the end of the road for my father. He got up, went into the kitchen, got a waxed-paper bag, and brought it back to the table. He shoveled a bunch of the carrots into it and headed for the door. His stepmother said, ‘Where are you taking those?’ and my father said, ‘To the children in China.’ Then he went to his room, got his passport and a metal box that had all his money in it and. . I don’t know, a change of socks or something, and went down to the port of San Pedro-they were living in Los Angeles-and took a boat to China.”

“Strong kid.” Rose picks up the ashtray and balances it on her stomach. She shoves it with a finger to make it wobble. “How long did he stay there?”

“Years. Until the Communists chased everybody out. Then he went back to California and bought a bunch of property. Eventually he married my mother. Then he packed up and ran away again, when I was sixteen. Back to Asia.”

Rose gives the ashtray a precise quarter turn. “Are you like him?”

“No,” Rafferty says immediately. “For one thing, I don’t run away.”

“I didn’t mean that. I know you’re not going to run out on Miaow and me. But, you know, you both went to Asia, you both wound up with Asian women-”

“Half Asian in my mother’s case.”

“Ah,” Rose says. “Well, that’s very different.”

“We both also have two arms and two legs. And that’s about all we have in common.”

“Mmm-hmmm.” She eyes the ashtray as though she expects it to try to escape.

Rafferty gives her a minute to elaborate and then asks, “Do you want to hear about the money or not?”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“No.”

“Speak to him?”

“No.”

“Did you try?”

“No,” he lies. She says nothing, so he repeats the lie. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Why would I?”

Slowly she turns to face him. “Because he’s your father.”

“The way I see it,” he says, “he chose not to be.”

She picks up the pack of cigarettes and holds it to the light, reading the health warning for the thousandth time, then takes a defiant drag. “He’ll be your father as long as he lives,” she says. “But we’ll talk more about it later. Tell me about the money.”

Rafferty grabs the rope she has thrown him. “He had this box in our house. A metal box with a lock on it. Really banged up, like it had fallen off a cliff or something. For all I know, it was the one he took with him to China in the first place. It sat on a table in my parents’ room, and I wasn’t supposed to open it.”

“So you did.”

“Well, sure. I mean, most of the time I had nothing at all to do. He bought about five hundred acres of desert outside this little pimple of a town called Lancaster and built a house right in the middle of it, then stuck my mother and me inside. The three of us and a bunch of dirt. You can only spend so many days counting rocks or whatever it is that people who love the desert do when they’re wandering around loving it. So I went to school, I read some books, I wrote some stories, and I opened his damn box.”

“Don’t pause now. It’s just getting good.”

“I popped the lock with a bobby pin. It took about forty seconds. And inside there were some old yellowed papers, an expired passport, and a bunch of money.” He holds his thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “This thick. But it wasn’t American money-it was from all over Asia. And I’d never seen anything like it.”

Rose’s eyes are focused on her lap, the cigarette forgotten between her fingers. He can actually feel her listening; the energy seems to pull the words out of him.

“Where I grew up,” he says, “everything was brown. The desert was brown, our house was brown-half the time the sky was brown, courtesy of the smog Los Angeles sent us every day. Buildings were brown and square: flat roofs, small windows to keep the heat out. Nothing was ornamented, nothing was designed a certain way just because somebody thought it would look good. It was like they went out of their way to make it ugly.”

“Brown and square,” Rose says. “My village was pretty much brown and square, except when the rice was green.”

“We didn’t even have rice. We had rocks, which were brown, and here and there a plant, and that was brown, too. And then here were these pictures, on the money, I mean. I wasn’t even old enough to think about what the money could buy. I just saw the bills as pictures.”

Her gaze is warm on his cheek. “Of what?”

“Clouds. Trees. Buildings with roofs that tilted up at the corners like a prayer. Lakes with bridges over them, and the bridges looked like. . I don’t know, lace or something. Everything seemed to float. In Lancaster the rocks were heavy and the buildings were like bigger, heavier rocks. And I unfolded that money, and I was looking at a different world, a world where everything was light enough to float. Some of the bills had faces on them, mostly old men, but they had something in their eyes, something that said they knew who they were. There weren’t many Asians near us. My mother’s family had Filipino blood, and there were a few Chinese and Koreans who ran restaurants, but they all looked like everybody else, like they were waiting for something to happen. The people on the money, though-whatever they had been waiting for, it had happened.” He puts his hand over her long fingers, touching the ring. “So there were two new worlds, one in the places and the buildings, and one in those guys’ eyes. And they both looked a lot better than Lancaster.”

“And hiding behind one of those buildings,” Rose says, putting her head on his shoulder, “was me.”

“If I’d been able to see around that corner,” Rafferty says, “I would have come here at fifteen, too.”

“Sweet mouth.” She yawns. Then she says, “Poke, I love my ring.”

“And I love you.” He picks up the ashtray and puts it on the table. “We’ll work this out, Rose. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m all right. But I’d feel better if I knew more about it. Right now the only thing I know is that the money was bad and we’re in the middle of it, Peachy and I. Is there someone you can talk to? Someone who could tell you more?”

“I don’t even have to think about it,” he says. “When the government is causing you trouble, you go to the government.”