Inventory of a Motorbike Shop in District Four
A short story about a fifteen-year-old in Saigon who must list every item in his father's motorbike repair shop before it is sold, and who writes into the list everything he cannot say aloud.
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Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.
Ba dropped a school exercise book on the workbench, the kind with a cartoon cat on the cover, and told me chú Phúc's accountant needed everything written down by Friday. "Everything," he said, wiping his hands on the rag that lives in his back pocket. "Down to the screws. If it isn't on the list, it isn't sold, and if it isn't sold we have to haul it away ourselves."
So this is the list. I am writing it in the order my hands find things.
Monday
1. Hydraulic floor jack, red, Taiwanese. Leaks at the left seal. Ba says it has fifty more lifts in it; he has been saying fifty more lifts for three years. When I was five I lay under it and pretended it was a crocodile, and Ba pulled me out by the ankle and spoke to me in the voice he uses for customers who argue about the bill.
2. Air compressor, Japanese, second-hand. The most valuable thing in the shop. Bought in 2001 from a garage in Bình Thạnh that was closing. We carried it home on the back of the Dream, me sitting behind Ba with both arms around it, and it was heavier than I was. It rattles when it starts and then it hums. I wrote it down, then I drew a line through it, then I wrote it again underneath. The accountant will see the line. Let him.
3–40. Tyres, thirty-eight. Stacked by the front in towers that lean toward the street as if they want to leave. Sizes 2.25-17, 2.50-17, and 70/90-14 for the scooters. I counted them twice because the rain came sideways at four o'clock and I had to drag the front stack inside, and once you move a stack you lose your count. When Đoàn Văn Bơ floods, tyres float. I know this because in 1999 I went after one in water up to my waist and Má screamed my name from the stairs so loudly the neighbours came out.
41. Shrine shelf, above the door to the back room. Ông Địa, round and laughing, and Thần Tài beside him, two oranges, a bowl of sand for incense, and the photograph of Ông Nội in front of the tyre-pump stand he worked on the pavement before there was a shop. Ba says the shelf is screwed into the wall and the wall belongs to chú Phúc now, so the shelf goes on the list. The gods come with us. I asked whether the gods would mind. Ba lit three sticks and said the gods have moved house before.
42. Floor, concrete, black. Ba says a floor is not an item. I am listing it because the accountant will stand on it. The black goes down further than any mop. By the drain there is a handprint, mine, age six, made when Ba was resurfacing and I didn't wait. You can only see it when it's wet, which in July is always.
Tuesday
57. Spark plugs, one box of forty, still in paper. At eleven in the morning a woman pushed a Wave in through the water with her trousers rolled to the knee and a sack of rice on the footboard. She said it died at the corner of Hoàng Diệu and she was late for her daughter. Ba was in the back. I pulled the plug, dried it with the rag, dried the cap, blew into the cover until my head buzzed, and it caught on the second kick. She gave me five thousand đồng and called me con like I was hers. When I turned around Ba was in the doorway with his arms folded. He didn't say anything. Then he said the plug was fouled anyway and I should have changed it, and he was right, and I put one new plug from this box into the drawer for her, for when she comes back, which she will, because people come back to the shop that started them in the rain.
63. Stool, low, blue plastic, cracked, taped. Ba's. He sits on it to do wheels. Since the winter he sits lower than he used to and gets up in two stages, one hand on the bench. I don't write that part for the accountant. I write: stool, one, condition poor.
88. Brochure, school in Singapore, glossy. Not shop property, technically, except it has been under the parts catalogue on the bench for two months and has a thumbprint of grease across the photograph of the swimming pool, which makes it shop property. Má found the school through her cousin in Jurong. The fees are in Singapore dollars, and in the margin Ba has converted them to đồng in pencil three separate times, as if the number might change if he asked it politely.
Wednesday
On Wednesday I did the arithmetic. Chú Phúc agreed a price on a handshake, and the accountant, who has a shirt pocket full of pens, will check that the list supports it. If the compressor and the welding set were not on the list, the total would fall under the price. Then the accountant would frown, and chú Phúc would want a new number, and Ba is proud, and handshakes in Khánh Hội come undone over less.
Nobody counts the compressor except me.
151. Welding set, arc, with mask and two leads. The mask has a scratch across the glass shaped like the Saigon River on Má's calendar map. Ba let me strike my first bead at twelve. It looked like a line of dried rice. He said, "Ugly, but it holds," and he hung a bracket on it that is still holding up the hose reel.
Chú Phúc came at five, under an umbrella with a hotel's name on it. He owns three shops already, one on Tôn Đản with a tiled floor. He patted the compressor like a horse. He asked how the list was coming.
"A hundred and fifty-one," I said.
"Honest?"
"Yes, chú."
He laughed. "Your grandfather never wrote anything down. When he died we found out half of District Four owed him for tyres."
After he left I told Ba the new owner would need someone who knew the compressor rattles before it hums, someone who knew the woman with the Wave.
"He'll learn," Ba said.
"I could work for him. Weekends. After school. Here."
Ba was sitting on item 63. He looked at his hands, which are black in the creases no matter what soap Má buys, and then at mine, which are getting there.
"You could," he said. "And in twenty-five years you'd be sitting on this stool, getting up in two pieces." He stood up in two pieces. "Eat. Your mother made canh chua."
I left the compressor on the list. I left the welding set on the list. I added the mask separately, as item 152, because it is a separate thing and worth separate money.
Thursday
160–209. Drawers. Washers in a milk-powder tin. Brake cables, coiled. Carburettor jets sorted by size in a plastic box I sorted myself during the power cut of 2002, by candle, while Ba told me how he met Má when her bicycle chain came off outside the market and he fixed it and then broke it again so she would have to come back. Má says this is not true. Ba says the chain is in this drawer. There is a chain in this drawer. I have listed it as chain, bicycle, one, old, and I have not tested his story by checking whether it is broken.
210. Calendar, 2004, from the bearing supplier. July has a circle around Friday. August has a circle around the date of the flight.
211. Radio, on the shelf by the fan. Tuned to the cải lương station, because Ba says opera keeps the bolts from seizing. Every horn on the street comes through it anyway: the long scooter horn, the three-tap horn of the xe ôm drivers waiting at the corner, the angry one. I could name the bikes by their horns before I could name the bus routes.
212. Fan, standing, one blade cracked. Turns left only.
213. Hose reel, on bracket. Bracket welded by me. Ugly, but it holds.
Friday
I added it up on Ba's calculator, the one with the 7 key that sticks. The total came to a little more than the handshake. I checked it twice and it came out the same both times, which is what happens when the list is right.
I gave Ba the exercise book at six, when the rain had dropped to a drizzle and the street was loud again. He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, which means he isn't really reading, and turned the pages. Then he pulled them down and read properly. He stopped on the floor. He stopped on the stool for a long time. He didn't stop on the brochure at all, which is how I knew he had seen it.
Then he turned to the last page, where I had written one more line in my best handwriting, the way they make us write at school, under the total, so that it couldn't be added in.
214. Spoke wrench, one, steel, four-sided, the handle worn bright where a thumb goes. Ba gave it to me when I was eight, the day I trued a Cub wheel by myself and it spun without a wobble against the chalk. It fits in a trouser pocket. They have bicycles in Singapore; I asked Má's cousin. Not for sale, going to Singapore.
