“Dun Ho,” Koon Lai answered, his heart pounding. “Ni ou nai?”
“Still at the training base,” the boy said in English. “There’s nothing to report.”
“Ni hiak fan miang a?”
“Twenty minutes ago. Potato and meatloaf. In the cafeteria. It was fine.”
It was not the words that comforted Koon Lai, but the tone: Richard was bored. Safe. He had not left the navy base yet but was already coming to his senses. Richard was not a studious child, but at least Koon Lai could prepare him to take over the restaurant one day.
It was true that, down at Key West, the navy was not meeting Richard’s expectations. So it occurred to him that the world tended to overpromise, to keep him ever-hopeful but never fulfilled.
What bothered Richard wasn’t the physical toil, or even the tasteless food in the cafeteria, but the mockery—how certain boys would raise their voices in an abrasive falsetto. “Me no muscle. Too many push-up. Me don’t like beef. Me want cat for dinner.” He thought his age-mates had outgrown this nastiness, but it turned out Brownsville was the anomaly.
There were two Puerto Rican recruits who appeared willing to be his friends: one from Harlem, the other from Orchard Street. They always left room for him at their table in the cafeteria. But they spoke Spanish when he wasn’t around and sometimes even in his presence, and he didn’t like the feeling that the three of them had been disposed of, ghettoized, at the table closest to the bathroom.
One night in the showers, as he scrubbed hastily beneath the lukewarm water, he heard a cackling in the stall next to him and saw a blond, freckled recruit smirking and shaking his head, his eyes on Richard’s wiener.
“Y’all got itty-bitty ones,” the young man said with a Southern lilt. “Size of my thumb, I swear.”
Richard, naked and dripping wet, lunged at the young man and knocked him to the ground. Next, he punched him in the jaw, busting his lip. Blood dribbled down the boy’s chin like hot sauce. They fought until a junior lieutenant pulled them apart.
“Quit rolling around like faggots!”
The fight earned him some enemies but also some friends, including two Irish guys from the Bronx named Connor and Rory. He worked hard to keep their favor, which sometimes meant tossing in a few dirty jokes during supper. “Every time that Spanish guy jerks off, I think a dog got in the room,” he’d whisper to his friends. Or: “When this Puerto Rican comes back from drill, he smells like a pair of old sneakers!” After about a month at Key West, Connor and Rory included him in their backslapping and shower singing, and on their jaunts to the downtown nightclubs.
Ultimately, they spent five months at sea, engaged mostly in scrubbing the deck. Then a telegraph reached the ship, declaring the war over. All the boys celebrated, and each was secretly relieved, for the more stories a young man hears about other boys rendered armless, legless, and blind, the more he dreads returning home mobile as a tree trunk.
Richard ran down the plank onto the docks of Battery Park and discovered a jubilant city—confetti everywhere and cars rolling slowly like parade floats, using their horns to ramp up the revelry. If he and his mates entered a subway car, the New York rules of silent, stony decorum fell away: little kids scurried up to touch his uniform; suited old men patted him on the back. At the clubs, bak gui girls flung their arms around his neck and begged him for a dance, and inthe window of a Blake Avenue shop, he found his name printed on a sign with all the other vets from Brownsville.
He’d left Brownsville a swimmer, a baseball player, but to his delight, he had returned a man. As he masticated a wad of gum in his cheek, his navy cap tilted on his brow, Richard felt he was approaching Gary Cooper– or Humphrey Bogart–level suaveness, though of course, there was that one difference.
He hadn’t written Rebecca letters from Key West, hadn’t the nerve to try forming a sentence that would compare with one of Alan’s, and hoped she wouldn’t think he’d forgotten her. On his second day back, he strode up to the Friedman house in his cap and uniform.
“Miss Friedman!” he called when he spotted her on the porch swing. Then he realized someone was sitting beside her. Another soldier.
“Richard! Thank God you’re home! Alan said you were back!” Leaping up from the hammock, she hurried to the fence, embraced him tightly, and kissed him on the cheek. A six-foot-tall GI, hands in his pockets, followed her down the steps. “Joe, this is Richard Wong, have you met Richard?”
“Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Joe Salzman,” said the GI.
Richard contorted his lips into a smile and shook Joe’s hand.
“Richard, look.” Rebecca extended her left hand. She pursed her lips, waiting for his response. “I’m going to be Rebecca Salzman.”
Richard said nothing for a noticeable stretch of time.
“Well,” he finally stuttered, his eyes on the pearl. “Look at that.”
“The wedding is next month.”
“We’ll send an invitation. All her friends are invited.”
“And we made a down payment today on a house in Marine Park.”
The wind scraped through fallen leaves and tussled with the American flag on the porch of the next-door row house. Richard fixed his gaze there.
“Congratulations,” he muttered. “I guess I should be going.”
“Don’t worry, boychik.” She pinched his shoulder. “I’ll still be around. When I finish my degree, I plan to teach in Brownsville!”
