Preston Allen - Las Vegas Noir

Her real name was Hong, which meant rose in Vietnamese, but it sounded a bit piggish the way Americans pronounced it, so I suggested the name of my first girlfriend in high school, and this she did give me, even though her friends still called her Hong.

Our first few years were happy. She took over the flower shop and I’d stop by every afternoon during my patrol to check in on her. We had a third of the week together and we spent it trying out every restaurant in Chinatown, going to the movies (she loved horror flicks), and walking the waterfront since the smell and the waves reminded her of Vietnam. At first I didn’t mind losing myself in her world: the Vietnamese church, the crosses in every room, the food, the sappy ballads on the stereo, all her friends who (with the exception of Happy) barely spoke a lick of English, even the morbid altar in the corner of the living room with the gruesome crucifix and the candles and pictures of dead grandparents and uncles and aunts. That was all fine, because being with her was like discovering a new, unexpected person in myself. But after two years of this, I finally noticed that she had no interest in discovering me: my job, my friends, my love for baseball, my craving for a burger or spaghetti now and then, the fact that until her I had not thought of Vietnam since 1973, when my unit just barely missed deployment. Vietnam was suddenly everything again... until she made it mean nothing. The least she could do was share her stories from the homeland, like how poor she’d grown up, or what cruel assholes the Communists were, or how her uncle or father or neighbor had gone to a concentration camp and was tortured or starved or something ; but she’d only say her life back there was difficult and lonely , and she’d only speak of it with this kind of vague mysteriousness, like she was teaching me her language, like I’d never get it anyway. So I got nothing.

When we made love, she’d whimper, a childlike thing a lot of Asian women do, only her whimper sounded more like a wounded animal’s, so that eventually it was just another way of making me feel like a stranger in her presence. An intruder.

I suppose our marriage became a typical one: petty arguments, silent treatments, no sex for months, both of us spending our free time more with friends than with each other. And still we kept at it, God knows why, until I came to believe, in an accepting kind of way, that she was both naïve and practical about love, that she’d only ever loved me because I was a cop, because that was supposed to mean that I’d never hurt her.

The night I hit her was a rainy night. I’d just come home from a shooting in West Oakland, where a guy had tried robbing someone’s seventy-year-old grandmother and, when she fought back, shot her in the head. I was too spent to care about tracking mud on Suzy’s spotless kitchen floor, or to listen to her when she saw the mess and began yelling at me. Couldn’t she understand that brains on a sidewalk is a world worse than mud on a tile floor? Shouldn’t she, coming from where she came, appreciate something like that? I told her to fuck off — which I rarely throw at anyone. She glared at me, and then she started with something she’d been doing for the last few years every time we argued: She began speaking in Vietnamese. Not loudly or irrationally like she was venting her anger at me, but calmly and deliberately, as if I actually understood her, as if she was daring me to understand her, flaunting all the nasty things she could be saying to me and knowing full well that it could have been fucking gibberish for all I knew and that I could do nothing of the sort to her. I usually just ignored her or walked away. But this time, after a minute of staring her down as she delivered whatever the hell she was saying, I backhanded her across the face as hard as I could. It shut her up, sent her bumping into a dining chair.

I had never before raised my hand at her. I’d arrested men who’d done worse to their girlfriends and wives, and I always remembered how pathetic and weak those guys looked when I confronted them. But when I felt the sting in my fingernails, saw the blood curling down Suzy’s busted lip and her just standing there in a kind of angry stubborn silence, I hit her again. She yelped this time, holding that side of her face and still staring at me, though now with a look of recognition that told me she’d never been as tough as I thought, which somehow annoyed me more. Would I have stopped if she had hit me back, as I’d expected? Her nose began bleeding. Her eyes teared up. But her hand fell from her face and she stood her ground. So I hit her a third time. She stumbled back a few steps, covering her mouth with one hand and steadying herself on the dining table with the other, until she finally went down on one knee, her head bowed, like she was about to vomit. She spat blood two or three times. As I walked upstairs, I heard the TV from the living room and the rain pummeling the gutters outside and then the kitchen faucet running, and everything had the sound of finality to it.

In the divorce, she was true to her word and I was left with a house full of eggshell paintings and crucifixes and rattan furniture. Months later, someone told me she had moved to Vegas. I sold the house and everything in it and tried my best to forget I had ever married anyone. I also went on a strict diet of hamburgers and spaghetti.

But then a month ago I bumped into Happy at the grocery store. To my shock, instead of ignoring me or telling me off, she treated me like an old friend. She had always lived up to her name in that way, and actually she looked a lot like Suzy, a taller and more carefree version of her — and, in truth, a version I’d always been attracted to. I asked her out to dinner that night. Afterwards, we went home together. We drank wine and went to bed and it wasn’t until we finished that I realized my other reason for doing all this. With her blissfully drunk and more talkative than ever, I finally asked about Suzy. She told me everything: how Suzy had become a card dealer in Vegas and met up with this rich, cocky Vietnamese poker player who owned a fancy restaurant and a big house and apparently had some shady dealings in town, and how they got married and she quit her job, and how everything had been good for more than a year.

“Until he begin losing,” Happy declared soberly, sitting back on the headboard. She said nothing more and I had to tell her several times to get on with it. She glanced at me impatiently, like I should already know. “He hit her,” she said. “She hit him back, but he very strong and he drink a lot. Last month, he throw her down the stairs and broke her arm. I saw her two week ago with a sling, her cheek purple. But he too rich for her to leave. And he always say he need her, he need her.”

I stood from the bed, a bit tipsy. I knocked the lamp off the nightstand.

Happy flinched. After a moment, she said, “Why you still love her?” There was no envy or bitterness in her voice. She was simply curious.

“Who said I did?”

She checked me with her eyes as though I didn’t understand my own emotions.

I tried to soften my voice, but it still came out in a growl: “Is it just the money? What — is he handsome?”

“Not really. But you not either.” She patted my arm and laughed.

“You know what? I’m gonna go to Vegas and I’m gonna find this fucker. And then I’m gonna hit him a little bit before I break his arm.”

This time she laughed hard, covering her mouth and looking at me with drunken pity.

“You such a silly, stupid man,” she said.

I returned to Fuji West at 7:30 that evening, just as the sun was setting. I drove this time. The parking lot was half full, mostly fancy cars, and I immediately spotted the silver Porsche in the back row. Sure enough, those were the tags. I rechecked the five-shot in my ankle holster. My hands felt bruised from the hot, dry air.