Tim'rous

Tim'rous

Written by Priscilla Wong

I Anorak

This is a story about Anorak, an incarcerated Cambodian gang leader.

WANTED.

Dead, or alive.

The streets of San Francisco are mean. Scared children tend to cling to one another out of shared warmth. Plenty of girls around, enough to fill a small dance hall. From order of the tallest, there was May, Wendy, Natasha, Jessica, Karen, Cindy, Annie, Angela, Linda, Mary, Donna, Alice, Lydia, Olivia, and baby Julia. These were the daughters of the Cold War, American born from refugees of China, Taiwan and Vietnam. All fair skinned, coincidentally.

The young man chosen as their leader and protector, was a tall Cambodian kid with an elegant frame, who we shall call, Anorak. The word that comes to mind for this man, is virility. There are some, who are born with more agility and wit. He was not dangerous. Though uncontrolled and impassioned, when it came to a domestic quarrel with his girl, Natasha. A bit like those rappers and their R&B girls. They were uninterested in higher education.

Only memories remain of Anorak and Natasha. Tall, dark and some would say, handsome, lucky to be born with a strong bone structure and abnormally large brown eyes for a man of Asian descent. Natasha was curvaceous like Rihanna, petite, with considerably larger eyes than the other girls. She wore her hair impossibly long, as smooth as silk. She painted her lips with thick liner and gloss, just like Kali Uchis, and the severe beauty always frightened me as a child, for its blatant vulgarity. There was a version of post colonial tea time, that involved Vietnamese iced coffee and a delicious pastry, moderately flat and crispy, with golden brown flakes, infused with the savory aroma of fresh scallions. Egg flower tarts, with curd whipped so light and sweetly fragrant, that a child who only knew of Asian diaspora, would not dare to want more in life.

Olivia's house was my favorite excursion. The atmosphere was light with borrowed jungle humidity, with the exotic Silver Dollar Coins planted in the garden, sprawling fern, parakeets that chirped quietly, elegantly caged, and the soft murmur of Mandarin that pulsed from within her parents, who unlike the typical peasant immigrant, spoke of intellectual concerns. Olivia, the quietest, the fairest, with her alabaster skin, fine fingers, and robotic demeanor, felt excluded from most adolescent activities due to her anemia. She couldn't fix her hair to save her life, but she was the gentlest. Only mean girls wielded a hair iron with expertise. Olivia spoke only of her research on chinchillas.

Some might say that she had Aspergers Syndrome.

It was easier for her to dive into topics of veterinary science, than it was for her to be friendly among other children her age. Her alabaster skin bruised and cut too easily. "What is this anemia?" I wondered foolishly. When I had fallen and nicked my legs or worse, my face, nobody cared. With childlike hubris, I knew I had good enough health to fall back on, wishing ruefully that I cared as much about perfect hygiene as Olivia did in my youth. Some scars never fade. I was the tomboy to Olivia's precious girlhood. I played basketball, hopped trolleys and rooftops, stole away for hikes, while the colored kids played their music loud and slid down the grassy hill in old cardboard boxes, doing back flips and causing a raucous, like Jackass on MTV. All the while, Olivia locked herself away for health restrictions. "Why don't you ever come out and play?" She caught a cold too easily, her cough was light and frail, and if ever, color showed up on her lips, it looked like a stain of blood, like a delicate porcelain doll.

It wasn't long before I discovered that I was a bit eccentric compared to the other girls.

May was as sturdy as a work horse, polite and agrarius. Wendy behaved like a docile pageant queen. Natasha, a proper diva, however lacking in imagination. Jessica, with her abnormally large lips and eyes, too awkward to ever speak. Karen wished dearly to be skinny. Cindy, Mary and Linda were happy to become moms, finding interest only in blue collar work. There was Annie, bright and literate, until the awkwardness of adolescence deterred her development. Angela was fated to be a sorority party girl. Lydia and Julia moved to the next town. Donna and Alice became proper video girls, for their love of hip hop. They entered the rave and never came out.

It was normal for a kid to be caught with a weapon at school. A pocket knife, taser, occasionally, a gun. A true outrage.

The otherwise graceful and dark Anorak had no reason to be entangled with fights among the Blacks or the Latinos, the Bloods or the Crips, but trouble crept into communities that wanted nothing to do with gang territory, drugs or violence.

By and by, the girls huddled around Anorak for protection. One was afraid of walking down the scary alleyway. Another couldn't bear to go the store without a chaperone. Others just needed a ride in his shiny white Acura, that would have fit in perfectly on set, of The Fast and the Furious, Tokyo Drift. There is a certain kind of pride felt in a young fawn who doesn't quite need a man. That is to say, many girls only dream of marrying a rich man. A quiet acknowledgement existed between us, a sort of knowing, that I wasn't all girl or all boy.

All of the sudden, bang bang! Mary cracked the door wide open. She was robbed, by a group of colored kids. They drew her in close with feigned politeness and roughed her up before taking her rucksack, along with her wallet and keys. So startled, I most fell off the couch with my pen and ink splattered over my crisp white tee. Mary was a sorry sight to bear witness. All tears and snot. One ugly bruise on her cheek that would turn into a black eye. Those kids would really harm a sweet simple thing like Mary, huh?

Ever a man of action, Anorak leapt out of the house to chase down the kids, speeding carefully to avoid the cops, weaving expertly through the streets, without as much as a squeak.

He didn't return until the crack of dawn.

By the time he came back, he wore a tired old grin, with his left arm in a small makeshift cast. After prodding the quiet slick a bit, the girls learned that he had broken his wrist from strangling a kid in midair with one hand. He had caught the thieves and recovered Mary's belongings. Funny how loosing just a few items, was enough to break a poor family. Amidst the celebration, I was downhearted to know that these kids, Bloods they were, would find him again the next day with a vengeance.

There was something in Anorak's height that made him seem more shadow than man, but what good was being tall against a pack of wild young things who'd been thrown away by schools and society both? These weren't children anymore - they were creatures born in concrete and raised on rage, each one of them carrying death in their pockets like loose change.

I watched them, time and again, moving through the streets like wolves. They'd pour off the trains and trolleys, a flood of dark faces and darker intentions, hunting the old ones who couldn't run fast enough. The shopkeepers learned to keep one eye on their goods and one on the door, though it didn't much matter in the end. When the cops finally came, they were always too late, showing up just in time to draw chalk lines around another body.

The gunshots became a kind of terrible music in those days. They'd crack through the night like lightning, and come morning the newspapers would sing their grim chorus about another dead man or boy. Sometimes both.

Only a person touched by madness would stay in such a place, where childhood died young and violence grew up in its stead, where every sunset might be your last and every sunrise brought new graves to dig. But there I stayed, watching it all through eyes that had seen too much but couldn't look away.

The following day, I dropped my colloquialism and left them all behind. Not even sweet faced, Julia was enough to bade me stay.

The news moved through town like wind through dry grass, touching every corner until the whole place shook. Anorak had tangled himself up with the law again, and violence followed him like a hungry dog. Bodies kept turning up in alleys and doorways, each one a story none wanted to tell but everyone whispered. Folks started looking at their homes like temporary shelters, counting the days until they'd have to pack up their lives and leave this dying place.

That last night, before I slipped away from him and Natasha like a shadow at dawn, I did something I'd never done before. My small hands, still soft with childhood, found their way to his face. They moved across the hard planes and valleys of it, learning every scar and whisker like a blind person reads braille. I was reading the story of a man who wasn't my father but somehow was, and he let me do it. Just me. Nobody else ever got that close to Anorak without paying a price, but he sat still as stone while my fingers traced the map of his life. Maybe he knew it was goodbye. Maybe he didn't. But he let me have that moment, and that was something.

Away I went and never turned back.

II Tim'rous

The boy came broken, that's what folks said - couldn't string two words together proper, lonely as a tumbleweed and beat down by life besides. What kind of hand was that for parents to be dealt? But they found their ace in the hole with their girl-child who could stand in for the son they'd hoped for. Like that Chinese girl in the old story who put on soldier's clothes.

She had been running wild with her dreams, chasing them down like a coyote after a jackrabbit. Women's liberation gave her that chance, till that fellow Trump came along. Had she known her brother - bullied and simple and left to himself - she'd have watched him closer, both in the flesh and in that electric picture-show they call the internet. Would've learned her beauty tricks sooner, how to iron her hair straight as a board and paint her face pretty as a picture, just to run with the internet queens. Might've even protected him from them vultures circling her trade, mean as snakes and twice as quick to strike.

The colored kids had their sport with him in the school washroom, liked how their fists echoed off them tiles like summer thunder.

Once she fought a pack of island boys trying to protect his addled head. But a child's heart turns hard sometimes, and she figured maybe weakness deserved what it got.

Here she was youngest, him eldest - why should his crosses be her's to bear? But life's got its own peculiar justice. One day the tormentors rang their telephone, threatening him like proper bandits. Quick as a jackrabbit, she caught their ugly words on tape - black boys and island boys both. The law came down, and for one shining day, she was somebody.

Life kept rolling on like the valley river. Picture-machines got popular but she never much cared for taking my own portrait until later in life. Her brother though, friendless as a desert stone, he posted the sorriest pictures you ever did see, marking her as kin for all to witness.

That was my mistake, letting that lie like a rattler in the grass.

Those competitors of her's, they smelled blood in the water quick as sharks. Her brother's pictures were like finding gold in their pan, and they knew their time had come.

TIM'ROUS

Tim'rous

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