Charles Waugh

The Harder the Bite

The Harder the Bite

Thương nhau lắm, cắn nhau đau.

                  – Vietnamese proverb: the greater the love, the harder the bite.

The stench of canine excrement swelled in the sun-baked Hanoi alley, a palpable physical presence like the blow of heat from a blast furnace door. Despite the feel of it on her skin, despite its invasion of the private sanctuaries of her mouth, nose and lungs, Trần Thị Su Su pressed herself forward. Not the type to turn away from something she had already put her shoulder to, no matter how unpleasant, she cast a determined glance at her partner in crime and American boyfriend of thirteen months, Merit Conover, whose angular good looks had sagged into an ugly shade of pale.

“You going to make it?” she asked, leaning close to get her voice through without shouting over the relentless din of barking dogs.

His pinched nose made his voice sound tinned. “Maybe?” he said. “You still want to do it?”

The smooth round landscape of her face turned to stone. “Once a decision has been made…”

“Right,” he said. He gulped for air and pushed his too-wide motorcycle helmet to the back of his head before finishing the proverb, “…and you cut down the tree, you’ve got to carry home the trunk and branches. I’m just saying, nobody’s cut anything yet.”

Su Su waved her hand toward the side of the alley where dozens of dogs lay bound in wire cages, waiting to be slaughtered, spitted, and roasted. They’d been stacked five high like cord wood on a ramshackle bamboo rack, their mouths open and tongues lolling in the heat, their barking loud in the narrow space. At the top, the dogs taking the full brunt of the midday sun were not the ones making the racket. They lay silently, their dry noses pressed into the chicken wire, their eyes rheumy and disconnected like coffee-scalded cream. Su Su held up the wire cutters she’d pulled from her backpack and unleashed another fierce look on Merit. “Go if you want,” she said flatly. “But leave the bike.”

She stepped toward the dogs. Her “Nice Time” flower-print motorcycle helmet sat just right over her D+G bubble shades. She wore trekking sandals with thick soles and Velcro straps—in case she had to run—along with black capris and a white t-shirt that said LOVE over her breasts and is a battlefield across the flat of her belly. 

“All right, don’t get like that,” Merit said through his pinched nose. “Give me the snips and I’ll open the cages. Just peek around the corner first to make sure everyone’s still having their afternoon nap.”

“In other words,” said Su Su, “stick to my plan.”

*

They had been introduced to one another the year before by mutual friends, a couple who like them was a Hanoi girl and a foreigner boy, but who had an unfortunate concatenation of names—Tim and Tâm—that could mean “looking for heart” when combined in Vietnamese. Tim and Tâm seemed to need another couple like themselves to confirm it really was all right to be together. But no one could put up with the kind of expectations a name like “looking for heart” made—not unless they really and truly fell in love—so it was no surprise when shortly after that first double date Tim returned to Australia and Tâm breathed a sigh of relief.

Despite such an inauspicious beginning, Su Su and Merit had managed to stick together, even though neither of them was any more aptly named. Her father had named her after ngọt su su—sweet chayote—his favorite kind of greens, and while she was long and skinny like her namesake, she could hardly be described as sweet. Instead, she had inherited the fierce fighting spirit of her mother, who had been tested in battle on a number of occasions during the American war. Su Su’s favorite story involved a narrow escape from a South Korean platoon, the use of an honest-to-god reed snorkel while submerged in a murky pond, and a dozen enemy KIAs from a single well tossed grenade.

Merit’s mother, on the other hand, had spent the war years waiting tables in the Best Western bar off Interstate 70’s exit 245, coming to terms with itinerant future and former GIs in her own way, turning the occasional trick with the ones crying in their beers and rolling the ones she pegged as too timid to call the cops after they’d passed out. She’d gone so far as to winnow the pool of names down to Winston and Merit, having decided that Lucky, Benson or Kool would more than likely get his ass kicked, but it was his grandmother, Shara Lynn, who had said she thought Merit sounded more “classified.”

When a Hanoian tried to read his name aloud, it often came out sounding something like “may zit,” which sounded bad enough without also suggesting he was a “shrieking mother.” Su Su took to introducing him as “Tài”—a loose translation for “merit”—and calling him “Bất Tài”—“without merit,”“incompetent,” or “loser”—in private when he cracked bad jokes, came too fast, or tried—as he often did—to apply some corny old Vietnamese saying he’d learned to modern life in Hanoi.

Still, they rolled along together smoothly enough until one April night at a typically jam-packed expat clusterfuck party at Le Pub, when Su Su had a sudden life changing realization. World Wildlife had teamed up with TRAFFIC and the Asian Wildlife Foundation to celebrate the launch of their combined campaign against the wildlife trade. Posters had been hung all over the bar—cute little pangolins looking crazily wild-eyed from the jaws of their traps, mountainous piles of dead snakes, the wilted corpse of an Indochinese tiger, etcetera, etcetera—cramming every inch of the place with aesthetically articulated death and dismemberment. The whole incestuous crowd of Hanoi’s international singles scene had filled the tiny bar, joined by a dozen or so backpackers drawn in from their hotels across the street, but even this loud, obnoxious bunch could not disrupt Su Su from staring at loop after loop of surreptitiously shot video—dogs being brained and gutted before roasting, rows of sluggish sun bears held captive in tiny cages for their bile, an untusked elephant flailing helplessly before its death—and retreating into the quiet refuge she had hollowed out inside her childhood self when her father would come home drunk from yet another evening spent at one of the men’s clubs that served this sort of stuff and her mother had to chase him off by throwing every pot and pan in the house.

Su Su quit her job the very next day. She marched straight from her promising career in the local office of a global fried chicken conglomerate to the offices of the wildlife NGOs, where she learned all too quickly that saving the animals of Vietnam meant volunteering to do work for no pay that pretty much no one else wanted to do. But, she stuck it out. After interning with three different organizations, she finally landed a low paying, part time position with the Don’t Eat That! group, translating Vietnamese laws and proclamations into English for the expat staff and proofing all the Vietnamese copy before it went to print. The new disillusionment took just one week.

“It’s all bullshit,” she raged to Merit at dinner the night he made the mistake of insisting she tell him how her day had gone. “They all just stand around and talk. Talk talk talk talk talk! No one ever does anything real, not a single thing outside the walls of that stinking little office!”

She fumed this way for several more weeks, until one night, when, after they had made love, their legs still wrapped around one another’s, his finger tracing circles round the copper brown buds of her breasts, she had said to him, “I have an idea.”

*

When she came huffing back around the corner, Su Su was not alone. “What are you waiting for?” she hissed. “Get the rest of those cages open! Go!” Nearly bent over double, she pumped her legs, throwing all of her slight weight into pulling a two-wheeled cart that trailed behind her.

The smell of it reached Merit first, a powerful reek like kidney beans mixed with sun stoked urine and the wild funk of matted wet fur, and on top of all that something else that he could not place until he saw clearly what was in the cage on the back of the cart. 

Bear.

An Asiatic black bear to be exact. 

Crammed into a chain-link cage that must’ve been draped over it while it was knocked out and then wired to the wooden pallet beneath it, the bear was about a meter cubed and held completely immobile. Only the tiny orange-brown dog-like eye rolled back at Merit as they passed, exposing a bloodshot sclera whose creamy color nearly matched the crescent shaped bib of fur beneath its chin. A catheter emerged from beneath its belly and hung over the side of the cart.

“This,” said Merit thoughtfully, “was not in your plan.”

“Talk later,” barked Su Su. “Cut now!”

Merit snipped the wire twists holding the dog cages closed at the muzzle.  Healthy dogs immediately squirmed forward, plopping to the ground like just-birthed calves. They spun around in the alley, clapping each other on the shoulders and mouthing necks and ears. The weaker ones could only offer up the dried out puddles of their eyes as he moved on to the next cage. 

Meanwhile, Su Su rested the handle of the cart on the back of the motorbike seat, and then with a water bottle from her pack ran over to the prostrate dogs to splash their noses and stretch open the cages to make it easier for them to wriggle out. Only two of this ten got to their feet. She emptied the water bottle on the ones still unable to rise.

“Why aren’t they running?” asked Merit. “I thought they’d all just sprint off into the streets, especially the frisky ones.”

“Me too,” said Su Su with a shrug. “Let’s go.”

“With the bear?”

“Talk later,” she said.

Merit dropped the snips into a cargo pocket of his shorts and mounted the motorbike. Su Su sat behind him, her thighs and buttocks pinning the crossbar of the cart handles on the seat the way she’d seen construction workers do it.

“Take it easy on the corners,” she said, tightening her pack and clasping him around the waist.

The motorbike engine chugged and they lurched forward. Suddenly Su Su squeezed him above the hips and said, “Wait! Stop!” then swung her legs over the cart-handle, whipped off her pack, and began to dig through it. 

“What are you doing?” Merit whined. “We need to get out of here.”

“It won’t mean anything,” she said as she pulled out her phone, “unless we have pictures to post.” Quickly she snapped shots of the dogs milling around the cages, of the ones still lying motionless on the ground, of the back of Merit’s black t-shirt and helmet above the wild stare of the drooling, shaggy bear.

Just as she remounted the bike, a voice came from the top of the alley behind them. “Ơi! Quái gì vậy!”

With the aplomb of her battle tested mother, Su Su looked over her shoulder and coolly snapped a pic of the angry man too before shouting “Go!” to Merit and then back to the butcher, “Đụ mẹ, thằng khốn!”

Merit cranked the throttle wide open and they raced up two gears, the engine ululating low then high. In the mirror, Merit saw the guy, his puffy round face as red and rough as a mangosteen, jogging to keep up until Merit hit third. Then the guy turned and sprinted back toward his shop.

“This is crazy,” Merit shouted. “He’s getting his motorbike—we won’t make it pulling this bear.”

“Stick to the plan,” Su Su shouted back. “When you hit Phạm Hùng Boulevard he won’t be able to tell which way we’ve gone.” She slid her phone down his thigh toward his pocket just as the bike thudded into a pothole. It jolted out of her hand and fell, clattering into pieces on the pavement now behind them. 

“Chết!” hissed Su Su.

“He’ll catch up any second,” said Merit. “Tease the bees, and they’ll sting.”

Su Su pinched the tight skin over his ribs. “Just go,” she said. “It’s smashed now anyway. Damn it, we needed those pictures!”

They careened down the winding, mildew stained alley. At the big boulevard at the end, Merit barely slowed as he pulled into the rush of motorbike traffic. The cart bucked and the bear let out a dissatisfied groan, but the flow of scooters simply coursed around, swallowing them up. At the next big street, Merit turned right, aiming for the six-way intersection just past Cầu Giấy at the zoo. A hip-hop boy on the back of another motorbike craned his neck as they passed, smiling and chattering excitedly to his hip-hop buddy driving, who slowed to stay abreast of the boy girl bear spectacle. The wide brims of their ball caps jutted from the sides of their heads at precisely the same angle.

“Going to market?” shouted the passenger boy, laughing.

“Money found at the market stays at the market,” Merit shouted back. 

The boy gaped incomprehensibly at him, then grinned.

“Catch flies somewhere else,” snapped Su Su. She dismissed them with a wave of her hand.

In the long stretch of traffic south of the lake at the zoo, Merit’s phone began to play Viet Thi’s song, “Naughty Girls Need Love Too.”

“It’s you,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s your phone calling.”