The Neighbors

The Neighbors

           Time was when you knew somebody’s last name you knew all about them; where they lived, their religion, what their yard looked like--neat or trashy--how they stacked their firewood.

           Used to be you could use the local phone book to level a table with a short leg. Now it’s big enough to hold the lid on a garbage can in a storm.

           That’s not necessarily bad, mind you, I got no issues with any kind of people; color, religion, how they dress, what pronouns they use, don’t matter to me. Still. These days, there’s not that --how do you say it—community there once was.

Now, if you need a cup of milk, or to borrow a rake, do you call on your neighbor? Do they even drink milk? Own a rake?

           Hard to tell anymore.

           Yesterday I was in the checkout lane behind one of those Asians and he couldn’t count American money.  I had to show him, “That’s a ten, that’s a five and that’s three ones. Here’s a quarter and a penny.”

           He looked at me and smiled and did a funny gesture, like a little bow with his hands together in front of him; like he was praying to me. He said something in that sing-songy voice they use but of course I couldn’t understand him. Then he turned to go, and I noticed he was wearing flip-flops. Flip-flops! And it was eighteen degrees outside! Could the man not afford a decent pair of shoes? He had enough money to buy two packs of Lucky’s, a six pack and a Penthouse. Non-filter, too.

           Like I said, I don’t have any trouble with any other human being but that’s not the case for everybody around here. You should hear them down at the VFW of a Saturday: “Gook” this, and “Slant” that. Lester Polk likes to say, “They was shootin’ at us over there and now we’re givin’ ‘em food stamps.  It Don’t make no sense.”

           He may have a point, but these people weren’t shootin’ at him. They was supposedly on our side. And as I recall we shot a lot of them, too. Also, as I recall, we went over there, they didn’t come over here; at least not ‘til lately.

           Things started out calm enough, but pretty soon things began to go haywire.  The first thing that happened was that one of them showed up at the VFW post. The guy looked pretty old, but we had no idea of his age. He was skinny and was missing several teeth. He had a U.S. government issued left leg, and the skin on his left arm was all baconated from being burned.

           Joe Burns was sittin’ at the bar watchin’ the Braves lose a double header and he turned around and said, “What the hell?….”

           It didn’t help that the man was wearing his native costume which looked for all the world like pajamas, but they were very colorful and seemed to be made of silk. I thought, “And they can’t afford shoes…?”

           The Sponsor, a young boy no older’n twenty-five who worked for one of them NGO’s said, “Mr. Vang would like to join your organization.”

“Like fuck,” Lester said, as he chalked a pool cue, his cigar hanging from his mouth. He was still wearing his greasy work uniform. We all glanced over at Regina Polk, Lester’s granddaughter. She liked hanging out with him. He kinda’ took her under his wing after his son left her and his mama to join a religious cult in the mountains. Either she was used to his language or she didn’t understand. She‘s a quiet girl. Not a lot on the ball. When she looks at you which is seldom, her eyes are sort of dull and vacant.

“But he fought with you guys in Vietnam,” the kid said.

“She-e-e-it,” Frank Coleman said.

“How do you know that?” Lester asked.

“I have his papers right here. He is Hmong. He was a hero in his country. His wounds came from a NVA RKP.

“RKP?” Frank said. “You Mean RPG?”

The boy stood silent, red faced. Then said, “Look. He dressed for the occasion.”

“Last time I saw an outfit like that, it was on a dead gook,” Lester said then turned and broke the rack of balls. They clattered around the table like gravel falling after an explosion.

“Is he an American citizen?” Lester asked, lining up the six ball.

“He’s working on it,” the boy said.

           “M-m-h-m-m.”

“I said, “Can he understand what we’re saying?”

“No. He understands very little English.”

“Then I’m guessing he can’t recite the pledge of allegiance,” Joe said.

Mr. Vang stood there grinning and nodding.

The boy held out the papers again. “It says here he was in the special forces. He was at Long Cheng, and Ban Pa Dong.

“So was the commies, as I recall.” Hard to tell which was which. Lester came over and yanked the papers out of the boy’s hand and glanced at them.

“I can’t read this shit,” he said. “How do you know what it says?”

“I trust Mr. Vang.”

Lester stared at him through a haze of cigar smoke.

“I’ve sent off for an official translation.”

“Well, you and Mr. Vang come back when you get it,” he said jamming the papers back at the boy.

“That could take weeks. Months.”

“What’s his hurry? He got to get back to the Ho Chi Min Trail?”

Joe and Frank thought that was hilarious. I have to admit that I chuckled a little. Peer pressure, I guess. Mr. Vang joined in laughing right along with us like he knew what we were saying. The boy looked at Lester then Joe then me. His expression seemed to be asking me to do something. I just shrugged. Lester holds all the cards in this outfit on account of he owns the big garage on Jackson Street and contributes a big chunk to the lodge every year including funding the annual Fourth of July barbecue lock, stock and barrel. He even pays for the band.

The boy turned to Mr. Vang and said something in his own language and Mr. Vang’s expression turned from laughter to disappointment. He put his hands together and bowed furiously to all of us, then they left. We all stood there silent for a while until Joe bent over and took a crack at the 11 ball and we went back to what we were doing before the interruption.

The next thing that happened is that some of the Asians built a church, It was a small cement block building painted white. It had their scribbly language painted all over it. Rumors spread that they was worshipin’ their grandpas instead a’ God in there. People got to talkin’ in the lodge, in the barbershop, in the supermarket, even in the Baptist church. It got so bad the preacher ended up preachin’ a lesson on the “Good Samaritan, inserting “love thy neighbor and “Bless them that curse you and Roman’s 1:16 in strategic places.  About six families walked out before the closing hymn.

When you passed by their church you could hear the chanting inside, and we heard them ringin’ their bells all day and into the night. Boys would go by there and yell at them; “Go back to the jungle, slant eyes” and things like that. A couple of times the place got rolled, even egged.

The mayor held a press conference telling everybody to “Welcome our new neighbors, etc., etc.,” but he only made things worse, him being married to an Asian woman and all.

Then Wal-Mart hired a couple of the girls to be cashiers, but almost nobody would go through their line, even though, as you know, Wal-Mart never has enough cashiers on duty. Those who did patronize them were sometimes followed out to the car by locals who gave them down the road.

Some of them tried to fit in, wearing western clothes and all, but most wore their traditional garb, the Ao Dai, which is worn by both men and women. This didn’t sit well with the anti-LBGT crowd. A lot of the girls wore white dresses that went all the way down to their flip-flops and big wide straw hats. Some of them were beautiful, I have to say.

One time a family even came to our church at the insistence of one of their sponsors who attended there. It was the day of the annual “All Day Singing and Dinner on the Grounds.” They brought a big bowl of noodles with some kind of meatballs in it. Nobody would eat it. But other than that everyone was nice to them, except when they went to leave they found somebody had keyed their car.

But they weren’t a total drag on the town; several of them who had had businesses over there were given low interest government loans to start businesses here. When Lester heard about it, he said, “Shit. When I expanded my garage. I had to mortgage my house and I still got turned down twice before I got a loan. Think I’ll go see a plastic surgeon and see if I can get him to make my eyes slanted.”

They rented several store fronts in a run-down strip mall south of town. All it had in it at the time was a Tienda and a thrift store. The Asians opened a manicure shop, a noodle place and a school teaching vovinam; a form of Vietnamese martial arts similar to American MMA, and later an Asian grocery and bar. 

The locals called the place “Little Saigon” when they were being nice and “Little Me Lai” when they weren’t.

Some of the high school girls started getting manicures and some of the football players took the martial arts classes, including the son of my neighbor across the street, Alan Sharp. The noodle joint became a hangout for the local high school students, which was fine with me. I wanted them to be successful.

One day I heard Alan say his vovinam teacher’s name was Vang. I asked around and found out he was the grandson of the same Mr. Vang who tried to get in the VFW. According to Alan, Vang’s grandson attended high school with him and helps his dad teach martial arts. Three generations living in the same house. Those Asians stick together. Back then we still had parallel parking on Main street and Johnny Goss-one of the Locust Hill Gosses; they were always a rowdy bunch-- rammed the back end of one of their cars while pulling into a spot in front of the hardware store. The man was sitting in the car waiting for his wife. He got out and started yelling at Johnny in his native tongue, gesturing wildly at his mangled back fender. Johnny got out and just stood there staring at the guy until he simmered down, then he made like he was pointing a rifle at the man’s head. He pulled the imaginary trigger and went, “Boo.”

Just then George Fink came by walking his beat –he’s one of the good Finks, not the Oil Camp Creek Finks—and the man went over to him gesturing and yelling in his native tongue. George flagged down one of the sponsors from the Unitarian church to be a translator. The man--Trong was his name, something like that-- said Johnny had threatened him. George asked if he wanted to press charges, but it seemed the man couldn’t grasp the concept. George talked to Johnny who said the bump was an accident and he’d pay any fine imposed, and his insurance would pay for the damages. As for threatening the man, Johnny said how would Trong know? He didn’t understand English.

Trong’s wife appeared about that time and they got into the car and left, and that was as far as it went as far as we knew.

But Johnny likes the bottle, and later that night he went over to the Rusty Nail, his favorite watering hole, which opens onto a back alley on account of the Baptists on the City Council, and when he came out about two AM someone had busted out all the lights and windows on his pickup.

Now there’s lots of people in this county that could ‘a done that; Johnny ain’t exactly Norman Vincent Peale, after all, but Johnny swore it was Trong or one of his buddies, so a couple of nights later, he drove over to the Asian church and threw a firebomb at it. They had security cameras so it wasn’t hard to figure out who did it. Of course, Johnny went to the slammer, a place that he is not a stranger to, but some of the townspeople wanted to know what was going to happen to Trong for damaging Johnny’s car.

The Sheriff said he couldn’t do anything because there were no witnesses. Everybody said it was obvious who did it. They had seen Trong gesturing at Johnny earlier in the day. He was obviously threatening Johnny just because his foot accidentally slipped off the brake (to hear Johnny tell it.)

A few days later somebody threw ink all over one of the beautiful white dresses that the girls wore to school. It turned out to be one of the Styles boys-not the Marietta Styles, but one of them from up by Jones Gap. He was suspended from school and his daddy was arrested when he showed up in the principle’s office with his pistol. That was the tipping point. There were threats and minor skirmishes at the school for a couple of weeks. Extra police patrolled the school to maintain the peace. A group of business men circulated a petition trying to get the stores in little Saigon shut down. The mayor laughed at them.  After a couple of weeks things calmed back down and the extra police went away and left old lame and nearly deaf Charlie, the resource officer, in charge.

Some of those Asian boys had formed a kind of clique. You might call it a gang. They all wore black pajamas like the Viet Cong. They wore red stars on their sleeves and black bandanas when they weren’t in school. The school has a dress code, but they all brought their costumes in their back packs and changed in the boy’s room right after the last bell.

They took to following a Lester’s niece home every day; first just one boy, then two, then several. Her parents both worked second out at the bottling plant and she was too young to drive.

Then one day about six of the boys followed her. Her house was near the park and she took a short cut through there every day. When she noticed the crowd behind her, she apparently panicked and when she got to the park she threw her books down and started to run. That was a bad mistake. Everybody knows you don’t try to out run a predator, but like I said, she was a little dense. The boys took off after her like a pack of wolves and caught up with her near the merry- go-round.

The 911 call came in at 4:15. A jogger had come across the aftermath and called it in. When The policeman got there, he didn’t know what to make of the scene. There were three boys writhing on the ground. One had a broken arm, one had a dislocated shoulder, and one had a dislocated knee. There were tracks in the dust where some others had apparently run off. Another Asian boy was sitting on the ground nearby. Someone had stabbed him in the eye. The pen knife was still in the wound. Rita was sitting on the merry-go-round holding her clothes to her chest. They had been partially torn off. She was covered in dust. One of her shoes was missing (later found in a nearby trash can). She had a black eye, but otherwise she was OK.

Over the next few days the story dribbled out in the Examiner:

How they had followed her home.

How she had tried to run.

How they had thrown her to the ground and started tearing at her clothes.

Then there was the story of Vang Li, the young vovinam master who had overheard something in the lunch room, and, after school, had followed the gang at a distance.

How he saw the attack and tried to make it stop.

According to the report in the paper the first one who came at him was the gang leader. He got a dislocated knee for his trouble. The second one got a broken arm. The third one tried to grab him from behind. He got the dislocated shoulder. Then the other three rushed him. He held his own until someone got in a lucky jab with the pen knife. But he did not go down.  He staggered back a few steps, then rushed the other boys and scared them enough that they ran off. It was only then that Li collapsed. The jogger had gotten there in time to see Li chase off the other boys.

On the same day that the last article about the fracas appeared in the paper another one appeared stating that it was Arnie Cooper that vandalized Johnny’s car. It was over a gambling debt. Turns out there had been a witness. Arnie’s girlfriend saw the whole thing and kept quiet about it until Arnie dumped her for one of the roller skate girls at the Sonic’s

Mr. Vang’s officially translated document arrived three months later, but it was too late.

He had already won third place in the VFW pool tournament. I never seen a one-legged feller that could shoot pool like him.

The end