The Silk Ball in RUSH HOUR: SIN
"The most striking and potentially controversial story in the collection is 'The Silk Ball' by Terry Davis, which weaves Hmong folklore into a story about the United States' secret war in Laos during the Vietnam period. Graphic violence and sexuality punctuate a story filled with poetic vision, longing and loss. Adults may be hesitant to let their young ones read this material, never mind the fact that the characters in the story --- and the age of actual soldiers in military conflicts then and now --- are closer to the age of the intended readers than the adults who would want to shield impressionable young minds from such material." TeenReads.com
The Silk Ball by Terry Davis
...a work-in-progress.
Chapter One
Credits Over
EXTERIOR: SPOKANE LATE AFTERNOON
An Asian kid, pack on his back, pumps a red mountain bike down a residential alley, through five o'clock traffic, then along the sidewalk of a marginal, seedy, low-rent, business district. He's Asian, all right, no question there, but he's clearly not Chinese, or Vietnamese. He's too light complexioned, short, stocky, round of feature. Is he Thai? Maybe Lao? His name is Cheng Moua (17), and his ethnicity is Hmong. It rhymes with "thong" or "long" or "dong." Or as Cheng likes to say, "Long dong." Cheng's broad, open face is scrunched with concentration.
A '75 Monte Carlo, maroon faded to the color of dried blood, roars onto the street and weaves in and out of cars parked along the curb. It's after Cheng like a hungry hog after a mobile mushroom. A sub-woofer, buried deep and pulsing like a rabid heart, allows the white kid at the wheel, Mike Higgins (19) and the light-skinned black kid riding shotgun, Wayland -- "Sleeves" -- Lovelace (18) to spray a lethal dose of Eminem over Spokane's east-central quadrant.
Higgins not tall, but big; big face, big body, big, period: like a large ham stuffed into a medium hamtin, and not happy about it lobs beer cans over the top of the Monte at Cheng. A can hits the sidewalk and explodes in foam. The cans are full! Of course. Who would assault with empty cans? Empty cans have no weight and can be nudged off-target by the concussion of a June bug against the forehead of a lawyer on a Harley-Davidson in another hemisphere. Empty cans by definition -- that is to say because they are empty -- carry no payload. You can't hurt anybody with an empty can. And Higgins' face tells us that he yearns to nail Cheng between the eyes and send him wobbling off under the wheels of a semi.
A beer can bursts against the barred window of a locksmith. A can lands on top of Cheng's backpack and settles there as though it has found a home. Cheng turns and sees it's a Red Dog beer. He smiles.
Sleeves smiles. His face tells us he is glad that Cheng is not under the wheels of a semi. There is, however, a detached quality about Sleeves that suggests he doesn't lose sleep over much of anything. A look at the top third of Sleeves here in the Monte's window gives us a hint at some things he might care about: 1. His looks: he is astonishingly handsome; 2. The welder's cape, also called sleeves, he wears. Welder's sleeves are a thick, rough suede jacket with most of the body cut off. What remains is collar, shoulders, suede to mid-chest, and long sleeves. Guess where Wayland Lovelace got his nickname.
Cheng shoots across the street, jumps the curb, whips down the sidewalk.
The Monte stops behind traffic at a red light. It expands and contracts with the ferocious bass. It breathes in this way like a living thing.
Cheng rides down the Hamilton Street sidewalk. He slows as he passes the windows of American Video. Two black women, a white man, and an Hispanic man with a little boy on his shoulders peruse the videos. Cheng smiles and waves at the Asian man, Yee Moua (36 ), his father, who returns the smile and the wave from behind the counter.
The light goes to the green left-turn arrow. The Monte is four cars from the intersection ... three cars ... two... one.... The arrow disappears. Traffic leaps forward. But the Monte smokes a half circle in the middle of the intersection and hurtles onto Hamilton.
Cheng looks back.
The Monte rumbles past American Video at a medium pace, menacing, arrogant, like a force of nature.
The pawn shops and mom and pop businesses fall away, the pavement ends, the sidewalks end, the dirt street narrows. The houses are one-and two-bedroom, cheap even in that post-WWII boom and mostly unattended, trailers, too, mobile homes, with the roofing peeling back, curling brown like the pages of drugstore paperbacks left on the deck of the public pool, no lawns. And then an island of bright green grass beside a thirty-foot aluminum trailer -- not an Airstream, but a decent unit -- with a trellis full of morning glories in front like the masthead of a shiny little ship in a sea afloat with wreckage. The trailer's windows vibrate to a deep bass booming, reflecting yellow-gold flashes of sunset. The sound rises in volume, and the skin of the trailer pulses in time.
Cheng stops. He turns and grabs the beer can. The look on his face is that of Snoopy saluting the Red Baron as he raises it to his pursuers. The he stows it in his pack and is off again.
Higgins gives Cheng the finger. Sleeves laughs. He says nothing, but this is what he thinks:
SLEEVES (VOICE OVER)
Hmongman.
Cheng looks out over his handlebars, hunches his shoulders, sets his jaw, pumps harder. Two blocks distant the ratty residential area gives way to urban desolation. A four-foot dirt berm is the border. There are no gates to climb, no chains to duck under, no ditches to ride through. There is only this bulge in the earth that must be ascended. These images fill Cheng's head:
The kids in ET lead fifty cop cars on the bike chase down the streets, between the houses, over the jumps, into the sky;
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid stand on the ledge hundreds of feet above the roaring river. The super posse is hot on their tails. "I can't swim," Sundance says. "Swim?" Butch says. "Hell, the fall ill kill ya." They each grab an end of Butch's gun belt and leap.
Indiana Jones sprints ahead of the gigantic boulder. The boulder is about to flatten him when it becomes a wave of aboriginal warriors letting fly with arrows and blowguns.
Cheng peddles for all he's worth. The berm looms closer, closer.
Higgins romps the Monte, sending a rooster tail of gravel and dust. He speeds after Cheng.
Steven McQueen revs his Triumph for the legendary jump of the barb-wire fence in The Great Escape. His rear tire spins, grass flies as he circles. Here come carloads of Nazis, Nazis on motorcycles. There goes Steve up the rise. He's in the air...
and so is Cheng. And then he's bouncing down through the sand and weeds of third-degree urban blight: Stone foundations, a rusted assembly line rooted in concrete like a fossilized spine, a baker's dozen of faded Holsum Bread vans, junked cars, garbage bags, grass clippings and brush, furniture, appliances, lawnmowers, mounds of construction debris, and the remains of one little house bleached gray by the sun, windows and doors gone, empty as a skull.
The Monte stops at the berm. Higgins watches Cheng weave through this Mad Max vista. Sleeves ejects Eminem, puts on something new. Higgins launches his cigarette into the weeds.
In the silence the Monte seems to deflate. It's just another piece of junk in the Spokane that time forgot. But Tupac comes on and pumps it up again. "Only God Can Judge Me." Higgins wheels around and heads back the way they came. Sleeves nods his head to the music.
Cheng looks back but does not slow.
Up ahead looms an enormous concrete pipe, so big that Cheng pumps harder, wheelies up the six-inch lip and pedals into it. The whir of his chain and the hum of his tires are amplified in the musty darkness, then he hits light again and shoots out the end of the pipe into a landscape of concrete and corrugated metal cylinders and half-cylinders. They are sewer pipes, sewer drains, culverts. Some lie on the ground, others are stacked thirty feet high. They vary in diameter from those in which skunks get stuck and die to those through which a dump truck full of dead skunks could drive to a place of skunk internment.
Cheng weaves through pipe canyons, around stacks of pipes that block the red-gold brilliance of the setting sun.
He whips into another huge pipe. This one is longer, therefore darker. But at the far end appears an old white house under a blue dome of sky. This circle of home grows larger and larger until Cheng is rolling down a gravel street, onto a crack-webbed sidewalk and up to the door of the modest house with its trimmed yard and flowers along the walkway, around the foundation, in window boxes, in hanging baskets, on a street where the bigger, once-beautiful old houses have gone to seed.
Cheng locks his bike to a porch pillar, bangs his head against a basket of nasturtiums, enters.
INTERIOR: MOUA HOUSE TWILIGHT
May Moua (36) Cheng's mother, speaks in Hmong as she ushers him to the dining room table like a visiting dignitary. Six places are set, but no one else is here. Cheng drops his pack on the chair beside him. May brings steaming bowls of rice, chicken, vegetables, heaps his plate. Her face is flat and hollow, her skin dull and lusterless next to her son who glows with first-world nurture and self-belief.
EXT. HAMILTON STREET TWILIGHT
The windows of American Video rattle as the Monte rumbles past. Two Asian boys climb out of a white BMW parked in front of the store. The Beamer's vanity plate reads VC-0001. The boys ignore the Monte. They are taller, thinner, and sharper featured than Cheng. They wear black slacks, black T-shirts. A brass bell, hanging like a golden apple at the top of the door, announces their entrance.
BACK AT THE MOUA HOUSE
Cheng's youngest sisters peek around the corner of the basement stairs. They are XIA (5) and YIA, (4). They duck out of sight when their mother walks to the stove, then they peek out again and whisper across the room at Cheng.
Cheng pretends not to hear as he places a steamed baby carrot in each nostril.
He turns and gives the girls an imperious look, one eyebrow raised, as if to say Are you addressing me?
The girls shriek with laughter.
May whirls from the stove, shakes her wooden spoon at them and speaks furiously. She takes a step and the girls scurry down the stairs. She speaks in Hmong, and we get a subtitle:
MAY
How dare you bedevil your elder brother. He must eat and then do his lessons.
Cheng takes the carrots out of his nose. He watches his mother step back to the stove, pour his tea. He watches her walk No, she doesn't walk. She trudges. He watches her trudge to the table, set down the tea, trudge back to her stool by the stove.
Cheng pops the carrots in his mouth, wipes his nose and his fingers with his napkin, picks up his fork, eats.
He looks up from his dinner, out the window to the house across the street.
THREE HMONG WOMEN
whose withered condition makes Cheng's mother seem vibrant by comparison, dressed in loose fitting black shirts and pants, their hair tied in buns, tend a huge, flourishing garden that surrounds a well tended tiny white house. One of them looks up, then the other two.
Cheng knocks on the window and waves.
The women smile toothless smiles, wave, and return to their garden.
Cheng frames his view of them by making a rectangle of his index fingers and thumbs. If the shot were tight enough, that could pass for Laos over there across the street. Shoot it against a mountain background, and it could be Laos.
Cheng drops his hands and goes back to his dinner.
EXT: PIPE YARD SUNSET
The surreal topography of round, gray concrete pipes is backlit in the eruption of pink-gold brilliance along the distant mountains, which do in fact look like the mountains of Laos. The gray pipes, because they are so many different sizes of round could be a herd of elephants headed into a Laotian sunset.
End Excerpt
Chapter One
Credits Over
EXTERIOR: SPOKANE LATE AFTERNOON
An Asian kid, pack on his back, pumps a red mountain bike down a residential alley, through five o'clock traffic, then along the sidewalk of a marginal, seedy, low-rent, business district. He's Asian, all right, no question there, but he's clearly not Chinese, or Vietnamese. He's too light complexioned, short, stocky, round of feature. Is he Thai? Maybe Lao? His name is Cheng Moua (17), and his ethnicity is Hmong. It rhymes with "thong" or "long" or "dong." Or as Cheng likes to say, "Long dong." Cheng's broad, open face is scrunched with concentration.
A '75 Monte Carlo, maroon faded to the color of dried blood, roars onto the street and weaves in and out of cars parked along the curb. It's after Cheng like a hungry hog after a mobile mushroom. A sub-woofer, buried deep and pulsing like a rabid heart, allows the white kid at the wheel, Mike Higgins (19) and the light-skinned black kid riding shotgun, Wayland -- "Sleeves" -- Lovelace (18) to spray a lethal dose of Eminem over Spokane's east-central quadrant.
Higgins not tall, but big; big face, big body, big, period: like a large ham stuffed into a medium hamtin, and not happy about it lobs beer cans over the top of the Monte at Cheng. A can hits the sidewalk and explodes in foam. The cans are full! Of course. Who would assault with empty cans? Empty cans have no weight and can be nudged off-target by the concussion of a June bug against the forehead of a lawyer on a Harley-Davidson in another hemisphere. Empty cans by definition -- that is to say because they are empty -- carry no payload. You can't hurt anybody with an empty can. And Higgins' face tells us that he yearns to nail Cheng between the eyes and send him wobbling off under the wheels of a semi.
A beer can bursts against the barred window of a locksmith. A can lands on top of Cheng's backpack and settles there as though it has found a home. Cheng turns and sees it's a Red Dog beer. He smiles.
Sleeves smiles. His face tells us he is glad that Cheng is not under the wheels of a semi. There is, however, a detached quality about Sleeves that suggests he doesn't lose sleep over much of anything. A look at the top third of Sleeves here in the Monte's window gives us a hint at some things he might care about: 1. His looks: he is astonishingly handsome; 2. The welder's cape, also called sleeves, he wears. Welder's sleeves are a thick, rough suede jacket with most of the body cut off. What remains is collar, shoulders, suede to mid-chest, and long sleeves. Guess where Wayland Lovelace got his nickname.
Cheng shoots across the street, jumps the curb, whips down the sidewalk.
The Monte stops behind traffic at a red light. It expands and contracts with the ferocious bass. It breathes in this way like a living thing.
Cheng rides down the Hamilton Street sidewalk. He slows as he passes the windows of American Video. Two black women, a white man, and an Hispanic man with a little boy on his shoulders peruse the videos. Cheng smiles and waves at the Asian man, Yee Moua (36 ), his father, who returns the smile and the wave from behind the counter.
The light goes to the green left-turn arrow. The Monte is four cars from the intersection ... three cars ... two... one.... The arrow disappears. Traffic leaps forward. But the Monte smokes a half circle in the middle of the intersection and hurtles onto Hamilton.
Cheng looks back.
The Monte rumbles past American Video at a medium pace, menacing, arrogant, like a force of nature.
The pawn shops and mom and pop businesses fall away, the pavement ends, the sidewalks end, the dirt street narrows. The houses are one-and two-bedroom, cheap even in that post-WWII boom and mostly unattended, trailers, too, mobile homes, with the roofing peeling back, curling brown like the pages of drugstore paperbacks left on the deck of the public pool, no lawns. And then an island of bright green grass beside a thirty-foot aluminum trailer -- not an Airstream, but a decent unit -- with a trellis full of morning glories in front like the masthead of a shiny little ship in a sea afloat with wreckage. The trailer's windows vibrate to a deep bass booming, reflecting yellow-gold flashes of sunset. The sound rises in volume, and the skin of the trailer pulses in time.
Cheng stops. He turns and grabs the beer can. The look on his face is that of Snoopy saluting the Red Baron as he raises it to his pursuers. The he stows it in his pack and is off again.
Higgins gives Cheng the finger. Sleeves laughs. He says nothing, but this is what he thinks:
SLEEVES (VOICE OVER)
Hmongman.
Cheng looks out over his handlebars, hunches his shoulders, sets his jaw, pumps harder. Two blocks distant the ratty residential area gives way to urban desolation. A four-foot dirt berm is the border. There are no gates to climb, no chains to duck under, no ditches to ride through. There is only this bulge in the earth that must be ascended. These images fill Cheng's head:
The kids in ET lead fifty cop cars on the bike chase down the streets, between the houses, over the jumps, into the sky;
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid stand on the ledge hundreds of feet above the roaring river. The super posse is hot on their tails. "I can't swim," Sundance says. "Swim?" Butch says. "Hell, the fall ill kill ya." They each grab an end of Butch's gun belt and leap.
Indiana Jones sprints ahead of the gigantic boulder. The boulder is about to flatten him when it becomes a wave of aboriginal warriors letting fly with arrows and blowguns.
Cheng peddles for all he's worth. The berm looms closer, closer.
Higgins romps the Monte, sending a rooster tail of gravel and dust. He speeds after Cheng.
Steven McQueen revs his Triumph for the legendary jump of the barb-wire fence in The Great Escape. His rear tire spins, grass flies as he circles. Here come carloads of Nazis, Nazis on motorcycles. There goes Steve up the rise. He's in the air...
and so is Cheng. And then he's bouncing down through the sand and weeds of third-degree urban blight: Stone foundations, a rusted assembly line rooted in concrete like a fossilized spine, a baker's dozen of faded Holsum Bread vans, junked cars, garbage bags, grass clippings and brush, furniture, appliances, lawnmowers, mounds of construction debris, and the remains of one little house bleached gray by the sun, windows and doors gone, empty as a skull.
The Monte stops at the berm. Higgins watches Cheng weave through this Mad Max vista. Sleeves ejects Eminem, puts on something new. Higgins launches his cigarette into the weeds.
In the silence the Monte seems to deflate. It's just another piece of junk in the Spokane that time forgot. But Tupac comes on and pumps it up again. "Only God Can Judge Me." Higgins wheels around and heads back the way they came. Sleeves nods his head to the music.
Cheng looks back but does not slow.
Up ahead looms an enormous concrete pipe, so big that Cheng pumps harder, wheelies up the six-inch lip and pedals into it. The whir of his chain and the hum of his tires are amplified in the musty darkness, then he hits light again and shoots out the end of the pipe into a landscape of concrete and corrugated metal cylinders and half-cylinders. They are sewer pipes, sewer drains, culverts. Some lie on the ground, others are stacked thirty feet high. They vary in diameter from those in which skunks get stuck and die to those through which a dump truck full of dead skunks could drive to a place of skunk internment.
Cheng weaves through pipe canyons, around stacks of pipes that block the red-gold brilliance of the setting sun.
He whips into another huge pipe. This one is longer, therefore darker. But at the far end appears an old white house under a blue dome of sky. This circle of home grows larger and larger until Cheng is rolling down a gravel street, onto a crack-webbed sidewalk and up to the door of the modest house with its trimmed yard and flowers along the walkway, around the foundation, in window boxes, in hanging baskets, on a street where the bigger, once-beautiful old houses have gone to seed.
Cheng locks his bike to a porch pillar, bangs his head against a basket of nasturtiums, enters.
INTERIOR: MOUA HOUSE TWILIGHT
May Moua (36) Cheng's mother, speaks in Hmong as she ushers him to the dining room table like a visiting dignitary. Six places are set, but no one else is here. Cheng drops his pack on the chair beside him. May brings steaming bowls of rice, chicken, vegetables, heaps his plate. Her face is flat and hollow, her skin dull and lusterless next to her son who glows with first-world nurture and self-belief.
EXT. HAMILTON STREET TWILIGHT
The windows of American Video rattle as the Monte rumbles past. Two Asian boys climb out of a white BMW parked in front of the store. The Beamer's vanity plate reads VC-0001. The boys ignore the Monte. They are taller, thinner, and sharper featured than Cheng. They wear black slacks, black T-shirts. A brass bell, hanging like a golden apple at the top of the door, announces their entrance.
BACK AT THE MOUA HOUSE
Cheng's youngest sisters peek around the corner of the basement stairs. They are XIA (5) and YIA, (4). They duck out of sight when their mother walks to the stove, then they peek out again and whisper across the room at Cheng.
Cheng pretends not to hear as he places a steamed baby carrot in each nostril.
He turns and gives the girls an imperious look, one eyebrow raised, as if to say Are you addressing me?
The girls shriek with laughter.
May whirls from the stove, shakes her wooden spoon at them and speaks furiously. She takes a step and the girls scurry down the stairs. She speaks in Hmong, and we get a subtitle:
MAY
How dare you bedevil your elder brother. He must eat and then do his lessons.
Cheng takes the carrots out of his nose. He watches his mother step back to the stove, pour his tea. He watches her walk No, she doesn't walk. She trudges. He watches her trudge to the table, set down the tea, trudge back to her stool by the stove.
Cheng pops the carrots in his mouth, wipes his nose and his fingers with his napkin, picks up his fork, eats.
He looks up from his dinner, out the window to the house across the street.
THREE HMONG WOMEN
whose withered condition makes Cheng's mother seem vibrant by comparison, dressed in loose fitting black shirts and pants, their hair tied in buns, tend a huge, flourishing garden that surrounds a well tended tiny white house. One of them looks up, then the other two.
Cheng knocks on the window and waves.
The women smile toothless smiles, wave, and return to their garden.
Cheng frames his view of them by making a rectangle of his index fingers and thumbs. If the shot were tight enough, that could pass for Laos over there across the street. Shoot it against a mountain background, and it could be Laos.
Cheng drops his hands and goes back to his dinner.
EXT: PIPE YARD SUNSET
The surreal topography of round, gray concrete pipes is backlit in the eruption of pink-gold brilliance along the distant mountains, which do in fact look like the mountains of Laos. The gray pipes, because they are so many different sizes of round could be a herd of elephants headed into a Laotian sunset.
End Excerpt
