The Year of the Crocodile Read online

  She raises a dubious eyebrow.

  “Not technically,” I amend. “I just asked him to behave.”

  “And?”

  I wave my hand. “Some bullshit about my being naïve and not everyone liking him. I’m not naïve, am I?”

  Tina meets my eyes. Very slowly, she nods. “You’re a little naïve.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that. I know not everyone likes my dad. I have the Internet; I could hardly miss it. He’s abrasive and difficult, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

  He is also everything I have. These days, he’s my entire family.

  “I want you to like my dad,” I say. “I need you to like my dad. What can I do?”

  She exhales and comes to my side. “I do like your dad.” She’s looking down now. “But he’s a blowtorch, always hot, and…” She swallows.

  “And what?”

  “And my parents are like a gallon of gas. Blake, they’re not going to get along. We’re going to have to choose. Every holiday we have while we’re together, we’re going to have to decide whether we spend it apart from each other, or spend it with just one of them. If we try and shove them in the same place, everything’s going up in flames.”

  I stare at her. I’m so used to my dad being the problem that I didn’t think about her parents. Shit. My dad was right.

  She shakes her head. “But that’s a problem for another weekend. We’re here now. We’ll have fun. Right?”

  “Right,” I say weakly.

  Right. Except…

  I think about what my dad said. He said he was going to fix this shit. I think about all the ways I have seen him “fix” shit throughout my entire life.

  And I finally, finally understand why Tina is biting her lip and looking away. A gallon of gas and a blowtorch. What could possibly go wrong?

  Everything. Every fucking thing.

  “Great,” I say slowly. “Let’s have fun while we still can.”

  2

  ADAM

  The next morning

  My plane landed forty minutes ago. A car was waiting for me at the curb; George, my assistant, had directions to the place I needed to visit programmed into my phone, down to a turn-by-turn description of the store’s interior.

  This is the first time I’ve been in a Wal-Mart in my fucking life.

  Don’t get me wrong. It’s not some misguided anti-corporatist bullshit on my part. That would be a heaping pile of hypocritical shit coming from me, pro-corporate leader extraordinaire.

  The reason is actually really fucking simple: I never went shopping with my mom when I lived at home because yadda yadda something gender roles. By the time I moved Cyclone out of my parents’ garage, I was already a multimillionaire, and someone else was doing my shopping.

  I’ve never needed to go to Wal-Mart. This is my virgin trip.

  Ha. Virginity. Like the ancient fucking Roman empire, all roads bend my thoughts in the direction of…no, not Rome. The analogy breaks down there. Never Rome. It’s more like Carthage. Which must be destroyed.

  Shit.

  I pause a moment in front of a display of Star Wars footed pajamas to digest that wave of bitter nostalgia. You get used to bitterness. It’s a fucking acquired taste, and after a few years, it’s so familiar that it’s almost welcome.

  I concentrate on my surroundings. I’m stuck in the here and now, no matter what I fucking want, so…

  This is the here. This is the now. Southern California. The place of my birth, to be fucking technical, although a Wal-Mart in Alhambra is basically the opposite side of the solar system from the wealthy half of Orange County where I was born.

  I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. If I believed the internet, Wal-Mart would be a haven of guns and beer and rednecks.

  In reality, I’m basically the only white guy I see. Also in reality, fuck the fucking internet. The internet coughs up hairballs on a regular basis. The shit it’s said about me, for instance. Besides, I know the stats our retail chief feeds me. Cyclone products aren’t cheap, and we do a reasonable business with Wal-Mart.

  Unsurprisingly, it’s a regular fucking store. Blue jeans. Giant cardboard tubs of virulently orange goldfish. Cans of pasta sauce. And there’s Star Wars shit everywhere.

  Speaking of my selfish pro-corporate agenda, I spare a moment of disappointment that Star Wars didn’t sell merchandising rights to Disney two decades earlier. This shit fucking rocks. Blake would have been really cute back when he was two in those Wookie pajamas. Now? He’s outgrown them by about four feet.

  But that’s the great circle of merchandising life in a fucking nutshell. The shit you can’t get for your kid, you buy in bulk for your grandkids.

  Big metal shelves and signs advertise every day low prices. I am trying to make logical sense of this. How can they be low if they’re every day? Doesn’t that make them regular? If I’d been the one hearing this pitch, I’d have interrupted and asked, and the ad guy would have ground his teeth, and everyone would have told me to shut up because it was a perfectly fine slogan, good even, listen to the campaign results before judging, Adam…

  Imagining being a pain in the ass to imaginary people is a great fucking mental distraction from bitterness. I make my way to the bakery in back.

  This encounter is going to be interesting.

  I love Blake. He’s usually a smart kid. But…yeah, if he thinks that I’m the only potential problem in meeting Tina’s parents, he hasn’t thought his shit through.

  The bakery counter is bustling when I arrive. A blond woman is in front, arranging cupcakes behind a plastic shield. The woman I’m looking for—I recognize her from photos Tina has shown me on her phone—is off to the side, behind a barrier. Her head is bent, her dark hair gathered in a messy bun and contained in a hair net. She’s looking down, concentrating on a cake. She’s shorter than Tina, but even the act of squeezing frosting out of a tube-thingy has her jaw set in resolute conviction.

  There’s a plastic wall between us, but I tower head and shoulders above it. I am close enough that I could reach out and tap her on the shoulder.

  I don’t. “Hey.” I pitch my voice to reach her ears alone. “Hong Mei.”

  Mrs. Hong Mei Chen looks up. Her eyes meet mine and her gaze narrows.

  Yep. She sure as fuck recognizes me.

  “You.” That word is imbued with a thousand suspicions. “What do you want?”

  “A couple minutes,” I say. “I—”

  She jerks her head toward the front of the bakery. “You forgot your custom cake order form.” She says those last four words so swiftly that they run together, like she’s so used to saying them that they’ve blurred into one word, no pauses. “I need a custom cake order form before I can talk to you.”

  I blink at her. “Are you fucking serious? You know who I am.”

  She rolls her eyes, then drops her voice in imitation of me. “‘You know who I am.’ Yes, I know who you are. Doesn’t matter. Corporate policy is that we need a written custom cake order form first, then you can give specific direction. You of all people should understand corporate policy.”

  I exhale. “Look. Hong Mei. This isn’t how I wanted us to meet, either. But I wanted to talk about Blake and Tina—”

  “Some of us still have to work. We can’t drop everything just because a big, important man wants to have a conversation in the middle of our jobs. You want to talk to me? I didn’t realize buying a cake was such a problem.”

  “Come the fuck on.”

  She tilts her head toward the order forms, and…

  And fuck it, why the fuck do I care if I have to buy a fucking cake? If Tina’s mother wants the damned form, she can have the damned form. I retreat to the front, fetch an over-xeroxed sheet, and chase a worn pencil nub out of the plastic tray that holds the papers.

  There are too many choices. What the fuck is the difference between a sheet cake and a round cake? Isn’t a cupcake cake a contradiction in terms? What in all the levels of hell i
s But-R-Créme, and whose bright idea was it to make “butter cream” sound more disgusting than it already does? I check boxes at random. In the space for “additional instructions,” I write, “We should probably have an actual conversation about our fucking kids.” As an afterthought—I can be polite on rare occasion—I add, “please.”

  I hand this over to her. She frowns at it, then leaves, returning with a square cake frosted in white. “Is this one acceptable to you? I know you’re very, very important, so I want to make sure.”

  “It’s fine.” I do my best to ignore her pointed jabs. “So. Blake and Tina are down for the lunar New Year.”

  She looks over her tools and selects one without so much as a glance at me. “I know this already, because they are staying in my home.”

  I don’t grimace. “Blake told me he wanted us to meet. Tina has been…less excited about the prospect.”

  “How could that be?” Hong Mei shrugs. “I tell her I would love to talk to you all the time. I have so many questions.”

  She loads a cartridge into the back of the silver whats-its-fuck thing she is holding and begins to airbrush parallel lines in peach onto the cake.

  So many questions? Yeah. I’m fucked.

  “For instance,” she says. “Blake said you were in Hangzhou last week.”

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. When I said I was a giant blindspot for Blake, I wasn’t kidding. This bright-eyed bushy-tailed love shit on his part is officially a goddamned liability. Blake literally can’t figure out that people might not like me. He definitely can’t realize that they might have legitimate fucking reasons. While that’s a really fucking flattering way for my kid to think about me, it’s also extremely inconvenient. He has no idea what he has been doing.

  “Great,” I say. “Are we talking about that?”

  “I like making conversation.” She gives me a diamond-edged smile that could cut glass. “Get to know you, a little small talk. I’m being polite. I have to decorate an entire cake. You should keep me company.”

  She tops off her parallel lines. I have no idea what she’s drawing. Maybe the beginning of a tree? Maybe the Washington monument? In peach?

  Fine. If we’re going to have this conversation, let’s fucking have it. “Yes. I was in Hangzhou.”

  “Thinking about a new factory for a product?”

  I keep my mouth shut.

  “Blake didn’t say,” she tells me. “I guessed. Don’t worry; I understand. Big corporate secret. You don’t want to tell anyone. Don’t worry; nobody hired me for espionage.”

  That is definitely not a giant, peach silhouette of the Washington Monument, I realize, as she adds a realistic-looking head to the top of what has abruptly turned into a giant uncut dick. She has a reasonable amount of talent if she can differentiate between circumcised and uncircumcised with an airbrush. She starts shading in balls to either side.

  She frowns. “Although I would be good at espionage. Almost as good as I am at decorating cakes.”

  “You would be complete shit.”

  She looks up in annoyance, and I shrug.

  “If you were any good at corporate espionage you would already have been hired out. You’re in a privileged position.”

  She waves a hand. “But we are not talking about me. We were talking about you. What is it like, working with the government responsible for the worst human rights abuses in the world?”

  “It’s fucking awesome,” I say smoothly. “Currency headwind’s a bitch right now, but we’ll move past that.”

  “You know what will be even better?” She is still decorating, airbrushing her piece, shading in the sides. “When Tina and Blake have my grandchildren. I will have to start influencing them very early.”

  She fights dirty. “You’d use innocent children in a political battle?”

  “You use innocent children in your factory.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. We do not. That report was totally discredited.”

  “So sorry,” she says, without a hint of apology in her voice. “English is not my first language. Sometimes I make mistakes. Did I say you used children? I meant that you take advantage of a culture where near slavery conditions, including child labor, drive down the cost of wages to the benefit of the Chinese government and yourself.”

  Fuck. Here is our problem in a nutshell. The Chinese government once tried to kill and reeducate Tina’s parents. It has also made me—personally—oh, something on the order of fourteen billion dollars.

  These two items of personal history go absofuckinglutely great together, like bananas and asphalt. Like marshmallows and the fucking swamp thing.

  No. I’m being too kind. These things go together like the Westboro Baptist church and a Pride parade.

  “No need to worry,” she says a little too sweetly. “I’ll make sure our grandchildren know that the reason they don’t know their great-grandfather is because he was killed by the government you support. You won’t need to explain a thing.”

  “Sure,” I say. “You won’t look like a hypocrite working at fucking Wal-Mart, which is well known for its ethical sourcing of labor.”

  She switches out a cartridge and begins to draw dark lines at the base of the cake-based erection.

  “Never tell a child of the Cultural Revolution that there’s no difference between owning the means of production and participating in the process in order to survive.” She does not look away from the cake. “I can kick your ass about labor politics in my sleep. Don’t embarrass our grandchildren by trying.”

  She’s right. Political philosophy was never my bag of shit. I don’t think about crap like this. I just do it.

  That shit she is shading in is definitely pubic hair.

  I fold my arms and stare at her. “You don’t want to play the grandchildren game. I’ll be the one giving them really fucking cool toys.”

  “Nice try. They’ll be half-Chinese. Guilt is stronger than toys. It’s a cultural thing.” She waves her hand in my direction. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Fine.” I shrug. “What am I supposed to do, then?”

  “So many options.” She looks up. “Here’s one. Move all Cyclone operations to Singapore.”

  Speaking of going together like the Westboro fucking Baptists and my pocketful of pink triangles…

  I try not to growl. “I hate Singapore. I hate everything about Singapore. Don’t talk to me about Singapore and human rights. Definitely fuck Singapore.”

  Her nose wrinkles. “You know what I find amusing? The fourth richest man in the world is buying a penis cake from Wal-Mart because he wants to talk to me.” She begins to hum as she draws.

  “So what would you do?” I ask.

  She looks up at me, her pubic art halting momentarily.

  “You wake up one day. Freaky Friday. Suddenly, you’re me. Do you say, fuck China, fuck everything, and just let the company go to hell, knowing that in the corporate world of Whack-a-Mole, someone else will just take Cyclone’s place? Or do you try to change the world?”

  “Ha. Easy for you to talk about changing the world.”

  “Yep.” I fold my arms. “I change the fucking world when I don’t like my breakfast options.”

  She sets down her airbrushing tool. “I decorate cakes. I wouldn’t understand.”

  Says the woman who could kick my ass about labor politics.

  “Hong Mei. I fucking confessed to a federal crime on a public livestream because my son was in love with your daughter.”

  She runs her hand along her airbrushing tool.

  “I didn’t get where I am by never fucking listening to anyone. You can play passive-aggressive bullshit with our kids and their kids. Or you could just straight up tell the person who is actually in a position to change things. And I will argue and fight, but goddammit, I will listen. Your fucking choice. You can try to change the world in millimeters. Or you can piss me off and make our kids miserable.”

  Our eyes meet. We stare at each other for a very long ti
me.

  “Shit.” She looks away. “I was afraid this would happen. I like you.”

  I don’t smile. “There was a fifty-fifty chance.”

  She fetches a bag of blue icing and begins to write letters across the giant penis she has drawn. Congratulations…

  She shakes her head as she writes in swirling cursive. “Tomorrow, we’re going out with our friends. Tonight, it’s just our family. You should come over. We play games and make noise and eat a lot of food.”

  “Great.”

  “Need the address? Directions?”

  “Nah. I have it all.”

  Hong Mei pops a plastic top on the cake and walks to the counter. “Here.” She pushes the cake to me, and I read the lettering for the first time. Congratulations on your penis!

  “Honey, when you’re done here, could you—” A blond woman comes up behind her and takes one look at the cake. Her eyes widen and she looks at me. “Oh my God. Sir. Is this what you ordered? I’m so sorry. That’s not—we don’t—that is, we’re a family friendly—”

  “Relax,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  “But—”

  I give her my best glower, which is pretty fucking effective. “Are you insulting my taste? I’ve always wanted to have my dick and eat it, too.”

  She flushes. “Oh. Um.” She looks at Hong Mei, and then back at the cake. “Okay.” She scurries away.

  “Okay. Tonight. Six o’clock is good,” Hong Mei says. “See you then.”

  “Want me to bring anything?”

  She considers this for a moment. “Soju,” she finally says.

  “Soju? Isn’t that Korean?”

  “Because I like soju,” she says. “Oh.” She frowns at me. “Shit. Rehab. Is it okay for you to be around alcohol? I should have asked first.”

  I meet her eyes. “Shit that makes me work less has never been my problem. Alcohol’s fine. Anything else?”

  She glances down at the frosted sheet cake in my hands and shrugs. “Cake.”

  I wait until I’m back in the car before I start composing my fucking email in my head. It’s all fragments, ones that I don’t let coalesce into anything like a real conversation.