Their boat had been drifting for a night and a day on the South China Sea. He was below deck with his youngest. They were molding rice balls with their palms and he was teaching her how to count. Already, his daughter was quick with numbers and he knew that by the end of the day, she’d be able to count to at least twenty-six for each of the mouths they had to feed.

She yelled “Twelve!” at the top of her lungs.

Viet reached over to pat her head just as the boat swayed forward and he lost his footing. “That must have been a big wave,” he said. She giggled holding her belly but stopped when they heard a woman screaming overhead.

“Papa, what’s that?”

A stampede of footsteps rushed to the side of the deck. “Shut up! Shut up!” The man spoke in a crude Vietnamese placing the emphasis on all the wrong vowels.

Viet put his finger to his lips. He kneeled down and placed a rice ball in her hand. “It’s like playing hide-n-go-seek okay? Stay under this blanket until I come back for you.” He kissed her forehead and closed the closet door.

Viet grabbed a knife and climbed the five steps knowing what he’d see before he even looked. Viet remembered his best friend, the brash economics professor warning, “It’s suicide. Don’t go. If the Communists don’t catch you, you risk the boat sinking, if the boat doesn’t sink, the pirates are there to kill you.”

Through the hole of the rusted sheet metal Viet saw two men in shabby western dress. The taller one was unbearably thin. He wore bell-bottoms. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses and a mop of shaggy hair. He could have easily been one of Viet’s students, languid, underfed, dreamy, with that fashionable look the girls were beginning to favor. Fashion boy shoved the families to the front and gestured with his knife like it was a wand. He yelled in his stilted Vietnamese, “Move! Faster! Faster!”

The shorter one looked like a bulldog with thick shoulders, a ferocious under-bite, and puffy eyelids. He wore a faded nicotine-white undershirt and brown pinstriped pants from the bottom half of a once nice suit. Viet couldn’t identify their origin until the bulldog said, “We’re never doing this again. We should have stopped. They have less and less, these fucking refugees.” He spoke Chinese. Fashion boy was grinding his jaw at such a rate, Viet thought he’d wear his teeth down to a paste. The bulldog said, “Bitch, did you get high again?”

The short one was older and clearly the brains. He walked along the deck, assessing each passenger one by one. Finally, he picked old man Phuc. Viet thought, you fool let him go. He has nothing you’d want. Old man Phuc didn’t care about money. He was a poet who’d fled his homeland with only a book of his own censored poems. He would read to the others at nightfall; memories of the Mekong, its dark fertile soil, and the pelican-like tides of schoolgirls in the the white áo dài from his youth. The old man had his arms raised in surrender when the bulldog slid the knife sweetly, gently, in a smooth line, as a warning slit across his throat.