Free The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction by Violet Kupersmith Page B

house, mistaking its long, winding entryway for another alley and startling the family that lived there. Their small child started crying when he saw Thuy, and she made a hasty exit. After what felt like hours,Thuy looked up to find that she was in front of a familiar doorstep; the city, having tired of toying with her, had deposited her at her grandmother’s house once more.
    As Thuy dragged herself over the threshold, she met Kieu coming down the stairs. “Oh, there you are! I woke up and you were gone. But I thought you might be with Grandma,” Kieu said, wiping the sleep from her eyes.
    Thuy sidestepped her and started down the hallway toward the kitchen.
    “Hey! Thuy! Where are you going? What are you doing out there?”
    In the garden, past the water pump, behind the lime trees and golden hibiscus and creeping tendrils of a particular flower-specked vine that had no name in English, was the body that had once been her grandmother’s. Greedy black flies and a mass of wriggling white worms were fighting one another for the last of the decomposing flesh. But Thuy knew that she had been dead for about three weeks from the smell alone.

LITTLE BROTHER

    H OW MANY TIMES HAVE I made the trip? More than the number of hairs on my head, and you see how thick it still is, even if it’s white now. Back when I started the job, over forty years ago, I would leave Ca Mau at noon, when the roads were hot and empty, and wouldn’t reach Saigon until dawn the next day. The roads are better now, so I could make it in seven hours if I drove without stopping. Can’t, though—too old. Every two hours I need to break and take a dribbly piss in a rice paddy. Children bicycling past me while I’m stopped like to peek at the harmless, wrinkled remains of my
cặc
and giggle. “Too many women,” I’ll call to them. “It’s all worn-out now.” I usually grow sleepy somewhere between Soc Trang and Tra Vinh, so I’ll sling my hammock between the truck’s back tires and nap for a while.
    These days I only ever get hired for boring jobs. I mostly move motorbikes and the kind of traditional carved furniturethat no one actually likes to sit on. Occasionally I make the odd coconut delivery and that’s about as exciting as it gets. But when the truck and I were both younger we carried anything and everything you could think of. Guns? Of course! Sometimes they heaped the open back of the pickup with AK-47 S —just tossed them in like sacks of rice and didn’t bother covering them up—and I would spend the entire ride listening as the guns rattled around, praying one wouldn’t accidentally go off. Other times it was soldiers crammed in the cargo hold; when the sun got too hot they all took their shirts off but kept their helmets on, and when I hit potholes they would reach up to keep them on their heads in unison. In the nineties it was a lot of livestock: wooden crates of pigs and goats, and every week a huge shipment of ducks, their feet tied together, twelve stuffed in each sack, twenty-five sacks in each load. If it rained during the drive, the quacking was deafening.
    Let me tell you my favorite story. Once, the son of a certain general—you’d know the name if I said it—paid me to transport a baby shark from Saigon to his house in Vinh Long. Well, they called it a baby when I took the job. I thought it might be catfish-sized, cute even. But when I came to pick it up at the docks I discovered that the beast was the size of a boat, with more teeth in its mouth than you’d want to see in a lifetime. It took me and seven other men to load the tank into the pickup. That was one of my fastest trips. I drove without sleeping and kept a bucket of fish heads in the passenger seat to feed to the thing whenever it started thrashing, for when it got restless the entire truck would shake. It was a spectacle.Curious motorbikes followed the truck for leagues, so distracted by the creature in the tank that they almost hit each other. When I