Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“You brought this upon yourselves,” Charlie Wah said sententiously. “You were given an address and told to wait outside. All you had to do was fetch Lo if he came out, and come back and tell us if he did not. This you did not do. Instead, when only one of our men came out and Lo escaped into the neighborhood, you terrorized a Chinese family and then tried to kill a gwailo. You got personal, and there is nothing more stupid, nothing more Vietnamese, than getting personal.” Then he said something in Chinese, very fast indeed.

A lot happened.

Most of the men converged on the Vietnamese boys. One of the men carrying a machete, the one who'd clobbered me, forced the knife into the hand of the kid with the Dumbo ears. The machete's mate, identical from my perspective, was urged upon the handsome one. The others forced the two boys apart by six or eight paces and then turned them so they were facing each other. The boys stood there, machete points dragging the floor, like mechanical soldiers that hadn't been wound up.

“One of you will live through this," Charlie Wah said. He was having a great time. “The one who does will let his friends know what becomes of-what's the idiom?”

I wasn't having any of it. The girl against the pillar stared at Charlie Wah as though she hoped her eyes could burn holes through him.

“Bad little boys,” the handsome one said. “And screw you.”

“A brave one,” Charlie Wah said, sounding regretful. “Unusual in a Vietnamese. Still, you will do it. Because if you don't-” He raised a hand.

The room was full of guns. All of them were pointed at the Vietnamese boys.

“-you'll both die,” Charlie Wah said. “And we'll let little Miss Vietnam carry the message. Or, better still, we'll kill her first and then flip a coin to decide which one of you we should kill. Not as much fun, of course, and if we do it that way only one little fish sauce gets to go out and play. One instead of two. In fact,” he said, jingling the coins again, “maybe that's best.”

“Kill me,” the girl said, her face twisted. “You fat pig.”

Charlie Wah gave her an understanding gaze. “I'm not really very fat,” he said, “but you can be excused an inappropriate figure of speech, under the circumstances. This must be a stressful time for you.” He strolled over to her, change ringing like church bells, and touched her face, the side that hadn't been cut. “Maybe we can find a way to make it more interesting. Who would like to fuck her before she dies?”

“You first,” the girl said defiantly. “If you think you can.”

Charlie Wah put his finger on the tip of her small nose and dragged it upward, distending her nostrils and pushing deep wrinkles into the bridge. The girl bit at him ineffectually, and the cut on her face opened up again.

“Not so pretty this way, is she?” he asked. “Still, she'll do in this light. I'll have to decline your offer, my dear. No way to be sure exactly what a Vietnamese has.”

“We fight,” Dumbo-Ears said. “You leave her alone.”

“Of course we'll leave her alone.” Charlie Wah let go of the girl's nose so suddenly that her head snapped forward. “This isn't personal. The idea is to discourage the rest of you from showing initiative when it isn't called for. Initiative is a fine thing in its place, but it's always touchy trying to figure out what its place is. Clear away, sons. Give them room.”

The sons backed off, looking disappointed. Now it was the handsome one who seemed adrift, the machete weighing his arm down. The boys stood in the center of a wide, flat concrete circle. Here and there on the floor threads sparkled, remnants shorn from minimum-wage garments.

Dumbo-Ears raised his machete. One of the men cheered derisively, earning a place on my must-kill list.

Dumbo-Ears struck a slow, sweeping blow that the handsome kid parried easily. Sparks flew off the knives. The handsome kid backed off, shaking his head, and Dumbo-Ears aimed a quick swipe at it, a swipe that would have cleaved a stone. The force of the missed blow swung him all the way around, and for a split second he stood with his back completely turned to his opponent.

Laughter.

The handsome kid backed away, saying something in Vietnamese.

When Dumbo-Ears turned around, he was weeping again. With his eyes closed he advanced and sliced the air with his machete. Its tip made a red line across Handsome's brown chest.

Dumbo-Ears had decided to live.

Now he was off balance, the weight of the machete dragging him down, and Handsome was backing away, staring down at his own sudden blood. Their feet scraped on the concrete, and their breath rasped like fingernails on silk. Dumbo-Ears recovered his balance, still sobbing, and swung the knife again, and this time it split the air above Handsome's skull, and Handsome raised his knife to stop it and then brought the knife down reflexively and cut Dumbo-Ears shallowly from sternum to navel, a diagonal slash that broke the fine brown skin, parted it, and let the red blood escape into the air. It splattered among the remnants, bright red berries in a drab Christmas wreath. Handsome looked startled.

The girl screamed a confusion of words.

“They're only playing,” Charlie Wah complained in English.

But one of them wasn't.

Dumbo-Ears took his knife in both hands and swung it horizontally waist high with a grunt of effort, and Handsome jumped back and just avoided being cut in half at the navel. He stumbled into one of the goons, and the goon grabbed his shoulders and threw him back, into the point of the other boy's upraised knife, which passed through the skin over his right deltoid muscle. Handsome emitted a shrill sound and dropped to his knees, the knife slipping out again, and blood pulsed out of the wound and drenched his chest and stomach.

But the other boy was coming after him now, slicing downward at his head, and Handsome got the machete up in time to parry the blow and then scrambled back between the thugs' legs and out of reach. The men laughed and backed away, and Charlie Wah, laughing too, said, “Give them room.”

The men backed up, widening the circle, and then one of them yelled something sharp and surprised, and Handsome burst into the circle from a new direction, behind Dumbo-Ears, and the machete split the air coming down and cut a flap of red meat from Dumbo-Ears's left arm.

The men applauded.

Dumbo-Ears backed away, staring in disbelief at his arm, and Handsome brought the knife up this time, sharp edge pointed toward the ceiling, in a swipe that missed everything but the point of Dumbo-Ears's chin and the tip of his nose. There was, as Charlie Wah had surmised there would be, a lot of blood.

Now both boys were screaming, not words, just raw red noise, and Dumbo-Ears was running forward at Handsome in a move so devoid of grace and lethal meaning, so obviously planless, that the men laughed again. Handsome retreated quickly, knife pointing up at a forty-five degree angle, at the ready, methodically seeking an opening, and it was obvious to me that Dumbo-Ears would be dead the moment he found it.

And then the harmless-looking little man who'd translated my joke stepped out of the group and stuck out a foot, and Handsome went down on his back, and Dumbo-Ears lunged forward and down and pierced him through the chest, falling over him in his eagerness to drive the knife all the way through and into the floor. His momentum carried him forward and he somersaulted over his friend, losing his grasp on the knife, but the knife wasn't going anywhere. Its handle pointed at the ceiling, the blade held in place by the bone of the other boy's sternum.

Handsome put both hands against the blade of the knife and pulled, either ignoring or not feeling the sharpened edge cutting into his palms. He tugged once and then again, more slowly this time, and then he gargled his own blood and his left hand fell away and landed on the concrete with a slap like a dead fish. He gazed at the ceiling, looking like Charlie Wah seeking an idiom.