to red and then to a morbidly gay yellow at the temple and hairline. His eyelid had puffed slightly, giving him a leering sort of expression, like the second banana in a burlesque revue.
He did twenty laps in the pool and then sprawled in one of the deck chairs, panting. He felt terrible. He had gotten less than four hours’ sleep the night before, and all of what he had gotten had been dream-haunted.
“Hi, Johnny ... how you doing, man?”
He turned around. It was Ngo, smiling gently. He was dressed in his work clothes and wearing gardening gloves. Behind him was a child’s red wagon filled with small pine trees, their roots wrapped in burlap. Recalling what Ngo called the pines, he said: “I see you’re planting more weeds.”
Ngo wrinkled his nose. “Sorry, yes. Mr. Chatsworth is loving them. I tell him, but they are junk trees. Everywhere there are these trees in New England. His face goes like this ...” Now Ngo’s whole face wrinkled and he looked like a caricature of some late show monster. “. . . and he says to me, ‘Just plant them.’ ”
Johnny laughed. That was Roger Chatsworth, all right. He liked things done his way. “How did you enjoy the rally?”
Ngo smiled gently. “Very instructive,” he said. There was no way to read his eyes. He might not have noticed the sunrise on the side of Johnny’s face. “Yes, very instructive, we are all enjoying ourselves.”
“Good.”
“And you?”
“Not so much,” Johnny said, and touched the bruise lightly with his fingertips. It was very tender.
“Yes, too bad, you should put a beefsteak on it,” Ngo said, still smiling gently.
“What did you think about him, Ngo? What did your class think? Your Polish friend? Or Ruth Chen and her sister?”
“Going back we did not talk about it, at our instructors’ request. Think about what you have seen, they say. Next Tuesday we will write in class, I think. Yes, I am thinking very much that we will. A class composition.”
“What will you say in your composition?”
Ngo looked at the blue summer sky. He and the sky smiled at each other. He was a small man with the first threads of gray in his hair. Johnny knew almost nothing about him; didn’t know if he had been married, had fathered children, if he had fled before the Vietcong, if he had been from Saigon or from one of the rural provinces. He had no idea what Ngo’s political leanings were.
“We talked of the game of the Laughing Tiger,” Ngo said. “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
“I will tell you of a real tiger. When I was a boy there was a tiger who went bad near my village. He was being le manger d’homme, eater of men, you understand, except he was not that, he was an eater of boys and girls and old women because this was during the war and there were no men to eat. Not the war you know of, but the Second World War. He had gotten the taste for human meat, this tiger. Who was there to kill such an awful creature in a humble village where the youngest man is being sixty and with only one arm, and the oldest boy is myself, only seven years of age? And one day this tiger was found in a pit that had been baited with the body of a dead woman. It is a terrible thing to bait a trap with a human being made in the image of God, I will say in my composition, but it is more terrible to do nothing while a bad tiger carries away small children. And I will say in my composition that this bad tiger was still alive when we found it. It was having a stake pushed through its body but it was still alive. We beat it to death with hoes and sticks. Old men and women and children, some children so excited and frightened they are wetting themselves in their pants. The tiger fell in the pit and we beat it to death with our hoes because the men of the village had gone to fight the Japanese. I am thinking that this Stillson is like that bad, tiger with its taste for human meat. I think a trap should be made for him, and I think he should be falling into it. And if he still lives, I think he should be beaten to death.”