Old Man Read online

  “I figure all my enemies, being the no heart sons o’ bitches that they are, will try to sneak up behind me, so I only need a moat on that side.”

  “Makes sense.” I nodded. Actually, it made no sense at all. Near as I could see, there wasn’t much about Tal Ledbetter that made any sense.

  “Besides, I got tired of digging.” More laughing from the two of them. What the hell had been funny about that?

  “You dug that whole thing?”

  “Me and that John Deere. Took me three and a half days to get it the way I wanted.”

  “For two cows.”

  “I’d planned to have more. Couldn’t afford ’em.”

  “Why have just two? If that’s all you can afford, then why not just go with none?”

  “Because I like cows better than cats.”

  Another answer that didn’t make sense.

  “The water looks brackish.”

  He nodded. “Yes, it does.”

  “Time to mount up, Nathan.” The old man got up out of his chair.

  I looked around for whatever Tal was going to drive us to the airport in. Nothing. But a taxi was pulling into his driveway. Tal and the Old Man did some more hugging while I walked over to the truck and pulled my stuff out of the back seat.

  The old man did the same thing as the taxi came alongside us. The driver didn’t look happy as he popped the trunk and got out to help us load our stuff. Except he didn’t help. Or say anything. He just watched as we threw the old man’s duffle bag and my suitcase and backpack into the trunk. He kept looking from the old man to Tal and back to the old man. He wasn’t very good at hiding how much he didn’t like either of them.

  Maybe he’d been mugged or something and figured these were the kind of guys to do something like that. I couldn’t totally blame him. They didn’t look like people you’d want to meet in some dark out-of-the-way place. Like where we were right then. Except it wasn’t dark.

  The driver got back in the taxi as we turned back to Tal.

  “See you in a couple of weeks.” He punched the old man on the shoulder.

  The old man nodded. Which is how I learned how long we’d be in Vietnam. Tal turned to me and grinned. “Good to meet you, kid.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, same. You’re the first good son of a bitch I ever met.”

  He grinned but only for a couple of seconds, then he looked at me all serious. “You’re wrong about that, kid. You’re travelling with one.”

  I shrugged and moved away to get in the taxi. I watched Tal and the old man talking to each other, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Handshake. Nods. The old man went around to the other side of the car and climbed in.

  “Airport,” he said and looked out the side window. Away from me. And away from Tal. He didn’t see Tal wave to us as the taxi rolled out. I did and nodded in Tal’s direction.

  If our time with Tal Ledbetter was an indication of what the summer was going to be like, I was looking forward to it even less. Nothing wrong with the guy really, just strange. The kind of guy you could spend a day with and at the end of it, you’d think, what was that all about?

  I sat in the unpleasant silence of that taxi, hoping my summer would get better but without a whole lot of confidence about it.

  9

  My first big international flight experience wasn’t all that memorable. I’m trying not to say boring. First came the airport in Minneapolis, where we had to spend an extra hour and a half because the flight to Los Angeles was late. The old man was going nuts because he figured we’d miss our connection. I couldn’t really have cared less. After an hour of sitting and watching planes take off and land, I just wanted to be somewhere other than in that airport.

  I bought a book of Sudoku puzzles. Part of the Asian theme. Yeah, right. I didn’t even think of that until the old man pointed it out. When he said it, I just shrugged. Didn’t have an answer.

  I’d never worked a Sudoku puzzle in my life, but by the time we got out of Minneapolis, I was pretty good. Could knock off the easy ones pretty fast. I figured I’d try some of the tougher ones in the next airport. LAX. Los Angeles.

  I watched Talladega Nights on the plane. Like, don’t they have any recent movies on here? Once he figured out we were still okay for our next flight, which was Los Angeles to Tokyo, the old man relaxed. In fact he slept pretty much the whole flight. If I’d known just how stupid Talladega Nights was, I would’ve done the same thing, although that would have meant missing out on the free beverage and “Cookies or Bits and Bites?” The old man was right about the food. The second time the flight attendant went through, I asked if it would like totally blow the budget if I had one of each. Apparently, the woman attendant somehow became deaf at that exact moment, because she dropped a Bits and Bites on my tray and moved on to the next row.

  I’d never been to Los Angeles, and except for the inside of the airport, I still haven’t. We had to hurry to get from our gate to the one for the Tokyo flight, which was in a different terminal. No time for Sudoku. Oh, damn. I could see tall buildings through some of the windows, and it seemed like everywhere there were these big-screen videos of amazing looking hotels. I told myself this would be a good place to bring Jen Wertz on our honeymoon. That’s if she didn’t fall in love with someone else while I was blowing off the whole freaking summer going to places I never wanted to see.

  The second leg of the flight was long. That’s all — long. Ten hours long. By the end of it, I had memorized every hair on the head of this chick who was in the aisle seat one row ahead of us. It wasn’t like she was amazingly hot. It was just that after another movie, a couple of thousand games of Sudoku, and part of one of the old man’s paperbacks, memorizing someone’s hair made sense to me.

  Actually, the movie was pretty good — Body of Lies, which was directed by one of my favourite Hollywood directors, Ridley Scott. I guess I know a lot about movies. You have a mom who works a fair amount, you watch more than your share of movies. Anyway, this one was decent. A couple of years old, but at least it was from this decade. Leonardo DiCaprio, the middle east, spies, some pretty good action scenes.

  The paperback wasn’t that bad either. The weird part was it was about this guy taking a train across America. Long trip. Like us — travellers. Except the book all happened around Christmas. The author was this guy named Baldacci..

  So okay, good movie, good book, chick with okay hair just a few seats away … why wasn’t I having a blast? If that book, that movie, and the chick with the hair had come into my life anywhere but there, and anytime but then, and if I’d been with anybody but the old man, it would all have been good.

  And that’s it — the highlights of my big journey. Enough said.

  Except for Tokyo. I’ll tell you about that part. We got in there just after noon. The weird part was we left Los Angeles on a Thursday and it was now Saturday. An entire day of my life had disappeared.

  The old man seemed to think that it was really important that we make up for the lost day. At least that’s what I figured he was thinking because suddenly he was in this big frenzy.

  We had a four and a half hour layover, and he said if we hurried we could make it into downtown Tokyo and back in time for the next flight. All so I could “get a feel for the place.”

  I wasn’t real nuts about getting into another mode of transportation even if it didn’t ever leave the ground. I was thinking more that a couple of burgers and fries, maybe some poutine, and about a pail of Dr Pepper might actually fix me up. But no, there I was running through the airport, dodging people with luggage carts packed higher than the people pushing them.

  I didn’t bother to tell the old man I could probably live out the rest of my life without having a feel for Tokyo, but I wouldn’t have been able to say anything even if I’d wanted to, because I had to run hard to keep up with him as he dashed for the taxi place. I’ll say one thing for him — he could run pretty good for a guy his age. What pissed me off was when we’d finished a death-de
fying dive into the back seat of a taxi that for some reason was already moving, I was breathing hard and he wasn’t. Just sitting there grinning at me. I knew what he was thinking …

  Now this is a buddy movie.

  I was thinking there’s a pretty good chance I might hurl right here in this taxi. I hadn’t eaten any real food in about eight hours — just chocolate bars and pop and the always tasty Bits and Bites. After the sprint through the airport, my stomach seemed to think puking was a pretty good idea. I took some deep breaths through my nose and after a minute or so, I felt more or less okay.

  I don’t remember a lot about Tokyo. What I do remember is that we spent most of the time driving. The old man decided we needed to see the Tokyo Tower, which is supposed to be patterned after the Eiffel Tower in Paris except the Tokyo one is a little taller. There are a couple of observation areas, and one is really high up, so you get this really awesome 360 degree view of Tokyo.

  Good idea, right?

  Well, it might have been if it wasn’t eighty-five minutes travel time in each direction. A guy directing people to the cabs told us that in perfect English. “Eighty-five minutes,” he said. “Less on Sunday, more during the week.”

  We’d no sooner got into the taxi than the old man started to worry about whether we’d make it back in time for the flight to Saigon.

  Sweet. A nice relaxing jaunt around Tokyo. The old man looked at his watch about every four minutes and kept telling the driver to hurry up, step on it, go faster and several other expressions that meant about the same thing. The driver kept saying stuff back to the old man but, of course, it was in Japanese. I figured he was probably saying shut up, stupid.

  I was getting one of my headaches. All very nice.

  “Maybe we should just turn around and go back,” I said.

  The old man looked at me like I was nuts. “No way,” he said. “No problem.”

  I have to admit, the tower was actually pretty cool. The driver got us there in seventy-nine minutes, six minutes quicker than what we’d been told at the airport, so the old man finally started to chill. Twelve thousand yen for the cab fare — one way. That’s almost a hundred and fifty bucks American. He never said how much we had to pay to go up to the observatory, but I bet it was a bunch.

  I was beginning to think the old man had some serious coin. Either that or he saved up big-time for this trip.

  Once we got up in the observatory, my head started feeling better, and I kind of enjoyed the view. We walked around the whole platform so we saw the city in every direction. There was another tower, newer and taller — called the Tokyo Sky Tree — off in the distance. Impressive.

  But the best part was Mount Fuji. I’ve seen mountains, some of them close up, but I’d have to say that was the most amazing, and biggest, mountain I’d ever seen.

  “If it’s cloudy or there’s too much smog, you don’t see the mountain,” the old man told me three or four times, like the fact that it was a clear day was all his doing. Part of the “old man tour of Tokyo.”

  The ride back to Narita Airport was a replay of the ride to the tower. Eighty-two minutes this time. We ran our asses off getting back through the airport, then through the security line and back to our departure gate about five minutes before they started boarding the plane.

  Now the old man was grinning. “Not bad, eh? You see some of Tokyo, and we’re back here in time, just like I planned it. Nothing to it.”

  Yeah, nothing to it.

  Saigon

  1

  Okay, what I said before about being pretty good with geography? Forget that. I expected Saigon to be all huts and mud — little orphaned kids everywhere holding out their hands and begging in these little pathetic voices, American man you nice … give little money. I expected to be standing in line at weird little shops (more huts), so I could buy a bowl of wet rice that I’d have to go through with my chopsticks to filter out the bugs crawling around in the bowl. I expected a city that was not like any city I’d ever see. I expected … a dump.

  And I was wrong. First of all, it’s not even called Saigon any more. It’s Ho Chi Minh City. Okay, that was partly the old man’s fault; how would I know that? He called it Saigon, so I called it Saigon. And in fairness to him, a lot of the locals still call it Saigon too. I found that out later. But officially, at the end of the war, when South Vietnam and the Americans lost and the North Vietnamese took over, the leader of North Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh, and he decided to re-name Saigon after himself. Nothing like a healthy dose of self-esteem.

  No huts, at least not in any of the parts of the city I saw. Skyscrapers, neon lights, clubs, restaurants, palaces, and parks — some people begging, quite a few of them actually, but not many of them were kids. If it wasn’t for the totally different trees and flowers, the gazillion people on little motorbikes and another gazillion people on bicycles and the fact that most of those gazillions of people were Vietnamese, I could have been in Toronto.

  And I was wrong about that too — the everybody-being-Vietnamese thing. The old man told me that a pretty big part of the population of Saigon is Chinese. Especially in the centre of town.

  Since we’d arrived at eleven thirty at night, I was pretty tired by the time we got our stuff off the luggage carousel, and the old man had flagged down a taxi outside. We were staying at a place called the Rex Hotel — the old man told me that while we were watching luggage drift past us on the carousel. Watching and getting pushed out of the way by rude people, who seemed to think that if they didn’t get their suitcase right now, the world was going to come to an end.

  I got pushed out of the way three different times. By the third time, I was getting seriously annoyed, and I was about to educate the little Asian guy who did the pushing on some of the more creative ways to use English swear words when I noticed that he was a she. A tough little she, but a she just the same. I stepped back beside the old man, who was grinning and shaking his head. I might have thought it was a little funnier if I hadn’t been so damn tired.

  Before we left the airport, the old man rented two cellphones at a little kiosk, one for each of us. “Our phones don’t work over here. so we’ll need these. Don’t lose it, or it’ll cost us, well actually cost you, a bunch.”

  One of the top five prettiest women I’d ever seen in my life explained how the phone worked and what our numbers were. I wanted to ask a bunch of questions just so we could keep talking to her, but exhaustion from the plane ride had ground my male hormones into powder, so I settled for nodding a lot.

  She spoke excellent English, but a couple of times she couldn’t find the word she wanted and fell back into Vietnamese. The old man seemed to understand, and even spoke a few words himself. I don’t know why, but I thought that was pretty impressive. I didn’t bother to tell him that though.

  The taxi ride was another adventure. I expected the first words out of the old man’s mouth to be Rex Hotel, but instead he said some stuff in Vietnamese. Then we discovered the driver spoke English, so the old man said, “Just drive around for a while.”

  I looked at him in the dark of the back seat. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Just for a few minutes. Go to sleep if you want.” Then he turned to the window on his side and stared out like a kid watching for Santa Claus. It was like I wasn’t there.

  It was close to midnight, yet there was an awful lot of light. Neon lights and street lights and the lights from cars and motorbikes. It felt like four o’clock in the afternoon.

  And there were a lot of people on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. That surprised me, since it was pretty late. Most were still in shirt sleeves because it felt like a summer afternoon feels back home. Lots of movement. There didn’t seem to be anybody just standing around. Quite a few eating places and most of them seemed pretty busy for that time of night. Except for the people eating in those places, everyone seemed to be in a hurry. A blur of moving bodies and vehicles of all types.

  Noise too, lots of it. The driver had
his window down, and there was this din — car horns honking, music coming from several different places, the rattle-hum of motorbike engines … and voices, loud voices that seemed to be speaking in syllables instead of sentences.

  The other thing I noticed was the smells. A big mix of smells. From the streets we drove down, there was the smell of food, kind of like when you go into a Chinese restaurant in a Canadian or American city. It was jumbled together with gasoline fumes and the occasional whiff of garbage. There was the smell of the inside of the taxi, too, a mix of body odour and beer, I think that’s what it was. And from somewhere, there was the hint of a flower smell. Like you were in a garden or a flower shop. But that smell wasn’t there all the time. It seemed like the other stuff overpowered it.

  “Stop here!” The old man had yelled it, and I jumped. Then he yelled again, something in what I guessed was Vietnamese. The driver looked in the rear-view mirror and shook his head, but he stopped the car.

  I looked over, and the old man was leaning forward and staring at a building. It didn’t look like much to me, just a store that sold vegetables and fruit. The produce was in bins and baskets both inside the store and outside on the sidewalk. Like one of those fruit stands you see in British Columbia. Then there were apartments or maybe offices above that for five floors.

  The old man opened the door of the taxi and stepped out. He said, “Wait,” without looking back, so I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or the driver. Both of us waited, and both of us watched the old man.

  He walked slowly to the building, looking up and down at it as he walked. Taking it all in. It had to have been a place that he knew for some reason when he’d been here before. Was it a grocer’s shop back then? I’d ask him later, but there was no guarantee he’d tell me. It didn’t seem like he was going to be telling me much.

  There was a skinny little guy selling the vegetables, but he looked like he was putting stuff away. Closing up. About time, it had to be after midnight. The old man talked to the vegetable guy for a couple of minutes. The guy pointed up the street. The old man looked where he was pointing, then he nodded, and the skinny guy went back to packing up his groceries, covering baskets full of stuff and setting them inside the door of the shop.