Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [15]
When she was done, she held out her hand.
“I’m Niki Ky,” she said.
He looked at Niki’s hand warily, as if he’d been offered a suspicious cut of meat or some strange tool he didn’t know how to use.
“You Chinese?”
“Vietnamese,” Niki replied patiently, this old routine like opening lines from vaudeville; she was starting to shiver.
“Vietnam, huh? My daddy, couple of my uncles, all fought in that war. One of my uncles got killed over there.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and of course it was a stupid thing to say, but the wind was cutting into her, razor blades and Novocain, and she was still holding her hand out to him, even though her fingertips were going numb.
“Oh, that’s all right. You pro’bly wasn’t even born yet, and they sent the body home.”
Niki’s teeth had begun to chatter, clicking in her mouth like tiny porcelain castanets. She looked longingly toward the waiting truck and tried to ignore the gun rack mounted in the cab’s rear window, the two rifles resting there.
“My name’s Wendel. Wendel Sayer. Pleased to meet you, Niki Ky.” And Wendel smiled again, finally shook her hand before pointing at the truck. “That’s my truck,” he said.
“Wendel,” she said, “I’m freezing my ass off.”
“Oh,” and he released her well-shaken hand, which she immediately jammed deep into one of the jacket’s spacious pockets. “Well, then let’s go find you that tow truck.”
Before she followed Wendel to the truck, Niki double-checked the door, making certain that she’d locked it. The car was one of the few tangible links back to her old life, and lately, things had had a way of slipping away from her when she wasn’t looking.
2.
Niki had been born two years after the fall of Saigon, twenty-three years after Eisenhower had agreed to fund and train South Vietnamese soldiers to fight the communists. Her parents were among the lucky few, the handful of South Vietnamese evacuated along with American citizens. John and Nancy Ky had become Americans and immigrated to New Orleans, traded in tradition and their Vietnamese names, the horrors of their lives in Tayninh and Saigon for citizenship and a small tobacco shop on Magazine Street. They had named their only child Nicolan Jeane, would have named the son her father had wished for Nicolas. Niki’s birth had left her mother bedridden for more than a month, and the doctors had warned that another pregnancy would very likely kill her.
Neither of Niki’s parents had ever made a habit of talking about their lives before New Orleans, had kept themselves apart from the city’s tight-knit Vietnamese community. Always seemed to struggle to answer any questions Niki asked about their lives before America in as few words as possible, as if bad memories, bad times, had ears and could be summoned like demons. There had been letters, exotic stamps and picture postcards from halfway around the world, messages from faceless relatives written in the mysterious, beautiful alphabet that she had never learned to read. Her mother had kept these someplace secret, or maybe she’d just thrown them away. Niki had treasured her rare glimpses of this correspondence, would sometimes hold an envelope to her nose and lips, hoping for some whiff or faint taste of a world that must have been so much more marvelous than their boxy white and avocado-green house in the Metairie suburbs.
And when she’d been ten, just a few days past her tenth birthday, there had been a terrible storm in the Gulf. The ghost of a hurricane that had died at sea, and she’d awakened in the night, or the morning before dawn, and her mother had been sitting at the foot of her bed. Niki had lain very still, listening to the rain battering the roof, the wind dragging itself across and through everything. The room smelled like the menthols her