Free A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler Page A

burnt up and dead. But the nutria does not think so and she licks his feathers and makes him well. Then he takes her with him to live in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where he fixes cars and she has a nice little house and she is a housewife with a toaster machine and they go fishing together in his little boat and she never eats an apple unless he thinks to give it to her. Though this may not be very often, they taste very good to her.

CRICKETS
     
    They call me Ted where I work and they’ve called me that for over a decade now and it still bothers me, though I’m not very happy about my real name being the same as the former President of the former Republic of Vietnam. Thiu is not an uncommon name in my homeland and my mother had nothing more in mind than a long-dead uncle when she gave it to me. But in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I am Ted. I guess the other Mr. Thiu has enough of my former country’s former gold bullion tucked away so that in London, where he probably wears a bowler and carries a rolled umbrella, nobody’s calling him anything but Mr. Thiu.
    I hear myself sometimes and I sound pretty bitter, I guess. But I don’t let that out at the refinery, where I’m the best chemical engineer they’ve got and they even admit it once in a while. They’re good-hearted people, really. I’ve done enough fighting in my life. I was eighteen when Saigon fell and I was only recently mustered into the Army, and when my unit dissolved and everybody ran, I stripped off my uniform and put on my civilian clothes again and I threw rocks at the North’s tanks when they rolled through the streets. Very few of my people did likewise. I stayed in the mouths of alleys so I could run and then return and throw more rocks, but because what I did seemed so isolated and so pathetic a gesture, the gunners in the tanks didn’t even take notice. But I didn’t care about their scorn. At least my right arm had said no to them.
    And then there were Thai Pirates in the South China Sea and idiots running the refugee centers and more idiots running the agencies in the U.S. to find a place for me and my new bride, who braved with me the midnight escape by boat and the terrible sea and all the rest. We ended up here in the flat bayou land of Louisiana, where there are rice paddies and where the water and the land are in the most delicate balance with each other, very much like the Mekong Delta, where I grew up. These people who work around me are good people and maybe they call me Ted because they want to think of me as one of them, though sometimes it bothers me that these men are so much bigger than me. I am the size of a woman in this country and these American men are all massive and they speak so slowly, even to one another, even though English is their native language. I’ve heard New Yorkers on television and I speak as fast as they do.
    My son is beginning to speak like the others here in Louisiana. He is ten, the product of the first night my wife and I spent in Lake Charles, in a cheap motel with the sky outside red from the refineries. He is proud to have been born in America, and when he leaves us in the morning to walk to the Catholic school, he says, “Have a good day, y’all.” Sometimes I say good-bye to him in Vietnamese and he wrinkles his nose at me and says, “Aw, Pop,” like I’d just cracked a corny joke. He doesn’t speak Vietnamese at all and my wife says not to worry about that. He’s an American.
    But I do worry about that, though I understand why I should be content. I even understood ten years ago, so much so that I agreed with my wife and gave my son an American name. Bill. Bill and his father Ted. But this past summer I found my son hanging around the house bored in the middle of vacation and I was suddenly his father Thiu with a wonderful idea for him. It was an idea that had come to me in the first week of every February we’d been in Lake Charles, because that’s when the crickets always begin to crow here.