"Hey Cousin."

“Hey Cousin.”

“Hey Cousin,” Martin snapped, “We each got our own ways. I play Russian roulette and that’s my own business.” I shut my mouth. The probability is 1/6 that he blows his brains out each time he spins the gun chamber and pulls the trigger. He is expected mathematically to do himself in after 6 turns at this game. He is living in the macho fast lane dealing heavy in drugs, and he doesn’t listen to me, his cousin from China – from the Old Country. His mother is my father’s oldest sister and has married out of the Lock clan, and so I have no say over him, a Lau.

And sure enough after I came back to Seattle, my father called me from Aberdeen and told me to come home pronto. I dropped everything and went home on Greyhound.

“Your cousin Martin died in a fight over his girlfriend,” my father spitted out his words one by one, “Martin came home after corrections and his girl had shacked up with another guy.” My father told me that Martin armed himself with a knife and broke into the bedroom of the ex-girlfriend and her new lover. She screamed and the new lover grabbed his gun under the pillow and shot Martin four times in the neck, as the stubborn intruder kept advancing even though he was shot in the neck, not once, but four times. Martin was finally felled.

“It is self-defense,” My father lamented, “there is nothing we can do.” He told me that my aunt is lonely as Martin was the youngest and was still living with her. “Go cheer your aunt up,” he said.

So, I took the Greyhound to San Francisco. Sources later told me that Martin was executed by the Chinese Mafia because he and his friends robbed a drug store that was protected.

4/12/2018