was over they had devoured rice, diced chicken, and fried vegetable sprouts in so many different combinations that Joshua began to regard mayonnaise as an exotic condiment and hamburger soup as a consommé devoutly to be wished.
Kha, the old man, had been a colonel in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam until early in the first administration of Richard Nixon, at which time he had come to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas with his wife and three children on a mission of mercy approved by the U.S. State Department. Madame Tru was suffering from a rare blood disorder for which she had been promised treatment at either the base hospital or the facility in Houston where Dr. Denton Cooley had made heart transplants as commonplace as tonsillectomies. A wealthy man, Kha had reputedly reimbursed the American government for the privilege of bringing his entire family into the country during a time of private as well as public anguish.
Unfortunately, Madame Tru collapsed and died upon first setting foot in an examination room at Lackland, a victim of the combined effects of her disease, her wearisome trip, and her own apprehensions. Reacting swiftly, Kha told the authorities that he was resigning his commission in the ARVN and requesting political asylum in the United States. He did not want to go back to the institutionalized chaos of a disintegrating war effort and a corrupt South Vietnamese regime. Besides, his only son was thirteen, fast approaching draft age.
“But you can’t seek political asylum in the country of your government’s foremost ally,” a bespectacled official from the State Department told Tru. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It does not make sense to ask a favor of a friend?” asked Tru Quan Kha.
“Of course not. You ask political asylum of a foe of the government you are seeking to flee.”
“My friend and my foe have the same face.”
“Then surely you can see your way clear to return to Saigon without resigning your commission and provoking an embarrassing incident.”
“The Republic of Canada honors your northern border,” Tru Quan Kha reflected aloud. “It is safer here.”
The government sought to return Colonel Tru against his will, but his son—a boy well-versed in both the English language and the many uses of the public media—went to the San Antonio newspapers with his father’s story and the startling disclosure that Tru would pay a handsome sum to any unattached native-born American woman who would marry him. By this stratagem, the boy admitted, Tru hoped to secure for his children and himself the same inalienable blessings of liberty enjoyed by the American people. Owing to quick government reaction, only a few of the newspapers containing this story made it to the streets. Nevertheless, ten or twelve patriotic bachelorettes responded favorably to Tru’s offer, and the publicity attending this local uproar threatened to leak out of San Antonio into other parts of the country. Gun-shy, the government relented. Tru was permitted to marry a fiftyish lady named Brenda Lu Bruno and so to acquire his citizenship.
Tru promptly moved to Florida, for he wanted to see grapefruit trees, Disneyworld, and Ritki’s Gift & Souvenir Emporium. He and Brenda Lu Tru did not live together, but corresponded regularly and filed a joint tax return each year to keep Uncle Sam off their backs. For over a decade, then, his son and daughters an ever-present solace, Tru Quan Kha had been a happy man.
* * *
Joshua did not initially increase his happiness. The old Vietnamese looked upon blacks as walking burn victims, who, if he touched them, would scream or slough off a pink-backed rind of charred flesh. Nor did he like being so much taller than Joshua. Even the age-induced curvature of his spine did not lower him to the young man’s eye level. Was his daughter—a good Catholic girl rechristened Jacqueline after the slain president’s widow—was Jacqueline going to marry a bruised toe of a man instead of a Robert Redford clone with a bankbook as thick as the Gutenberg Bible? Perhaps. No one could fathom Jackie’s intentions. And if Joshua was in her plans, how could Joshua increase Kha’s happiness?
First, by increasing Jackie’s happiness, a task at which he seemed to excel; and second, by amusing her father. The boy—the young man, rather—could tell marvelous stories. Stories in which vaguely human creatures, in order to sustain themselves, dug tubers out of the ground, captured small birds, and scavenged the leftovers of predators larger than they. Many unlikely animals shared the ancient grasslands with