and the girl took.
“Wait, Sam” Mai says urgently. “Do not do anything.”
I start to say that we have to find Bobby, but Mai’s raised palm hushes me as she strains to hear what the man who ate the neck kick is telling those holding him up.
“Okay,” she says. “These men are not Lai Van Tan. They are canh sát, policemen. He says the boy is… what is the English word? He leave parents. He run…”
“Bobby is a runaway? A runaway?”
“Yes, that is the word, runaway. Policeman say he leave his home without permission. Canh sát were trying to, uh, catch him for his father in California.”
So that’s why his demeanor changed when I asked about his parents. That’s why he was acting so suspiciously after the plane landed and while we were processing out. He was watching for the police.
“Can we go look for him, Mai? I want to see that he’s okay.”
“Yes, we are going that way anyway.” She picks up one of my bags.
She leads me around the crowd and over to the curb where there are lines of parked taxis of every make and color, and a mad horde of drivers calling to us and reaching for our arms as we pass. He could be in any one of these cars and—
“Sam!” Bobby’s voice penetrates the street noise.
Mai points toward a moving car. “There.”
Bobby is pushing his face out the back side window of a blue taxi that’s jockeying to get into the flow of passing vehicles. He waves at me, and puts his thumb to his ear and his little finger to his mouth.
“Never a dull moment with you,” Mai says, watching her side mirror as she jockeys her Volvo out into the chaos that appears to be the traffic pattern here. She does some kind of wave out the window, which is either a “thank you” or a “cram it up where the sun don’t shine” gesture. Either way, it sets off a cacophony of honking. A motorbike roars around her driver’s side, its accelerating engine deafening through the open window. A second one passes so closely that Mai nearly loses her side mirror. Another cuts around us and comes within four hairs-width of clipping her front fender.
“My God, Mai. This is nuts. Has there been a coup d’état? Is everyone fleeing the city? Is China attacking?”
She laughs, a sound that’s big, like it’s coming from a 300-pound opera singer, a trait I really like. “No, everything is fine,” she says, closing the window. “If any of those things were happening, traffic would be really—” She brakes hard when a white truck cuts into our lane, just inches from our hood. “Really bad,” she finishes. A motor scooter shoots from the right lane between the truck and our front end, swoops into the left lane, and disappears around the truck.
“Mother of Buddha!” I cry.
She laughs again. “We will be out of this airport traffic in a minute and then it will be even more crowded, but there will be some organization to it.” She looks over at me and croons. “Oooh, don’t be scared.”
“Watch the road, will you?” I relax my clenched fists and try to retrieve my machismo. “I guess I’m just not used to it—” Two motorbikes pull up along side us, one by my window and one by Mai’s, the riders are young, both wearing pale blue shirts and wrap-around sunglasses. “These guys want to get inside our car?”
Mai smiles. “Personal space, even in traffic, is different here than in Portland. After a year in your city, it took me three weeks to get used to this again. Same thing when I returned from my year in Paris. I see now how crazy our streets might seem to foreigners, but as you say in America, ‘It is what it is.’”
The motorbikes are still close enough for their drivers to tap on our respective windows.
“I can’t believe I’m here. It’s surreal.”
“I am so very happy now. I hope you will like it here.”
I make a big motion with my head as I look her up and down. “I like the scenery so far.”
She giggles and punches me in the thigh.
“Ow!” I blurt, not faking. She hit me in the nerve just above my kneecap.
“Sorry,” she says with phony concern. “Was that too hard?”
“Uh, yeah. I guess I shouldn’t undress you with my eyes, huh?”
She laughs. “I am not sure what that means but it sound very, very good.”
“Well,” I say rubbing my leg. “When someone looks at…”
The motorbike rider on Mai’s side turns toward her and for a second I can see her profile in his mirrored sunglasses. When he lifts his head ever so slightly, I see my face in them. He smiles and lifts his left hand from the handlebar, his pointing index finger and upright thumb shaped like a gun, and shoots at me.
“Hey!” I shout, and he “fires” at me again. “Mai, that guy on the motorbike—”
“What?” she looks toward me.
The motorbike driver banks hard to the left.
She jerks her head toward her side window. “Guy?”
I look out the rear side window and see him merge into a mass of traffic moving down a side street.
The one outside my window is gone too.
“The rider next to your window looked at us and then did this with his hand. You know, like he was firing a gun at me.”
“Are you sure? Oh, I’m sorry, Sam. Of course you’re sure.”
The white truck hangs a right, revealing hundreds of motorbikes, bicycles, cars, and pedicabs, randomly cutting right and left.
“Could it have been Lai Van Tan’s people?” I ask. “Were you followed, maybe?”
Listen to me. I’m a hysterical teenage girl. Get control of yourself. Try to impress the woman a little.
“I do not know, but I don’t think so.”
“Then who was the guy? Is that how you welcome newcomers here—make bang bang gestures?” So much for impressing her.
Mai looks at me, eyebrows bunched. “Sam? Are you okay?”
I take a deep breath. “I don’t know. Just tense I guess. It’s been a crazy few weeks. Meeting you, meeting my father, my school burns down—and everybody was kung-fu fighting and dealing with all the legal stuff, and then Mark coming to me telling me he knows what happened. The whole time I was at the airport in Portland, I kept waiting for the detectives to show up and put me into handcuffs. I’m finally here, and I’m exhausted and jet lagged, and the young man I flew with turns out to be a runaway who kicks cops. Now motorbike guys are pretending to shoot at me.”
