Hao brought the New Straits Times to the kitchen table and turned off the small electric fan in order to read. It wasn’t, Kim understood, the fan’s noise that disturbed him, but its interference with the pages. Each evening he sat here with Dr. Bourgois’s morning edition of the New Straits Times, parsing out the news in English in his underwear, and, on Thursday or Friday, the doctor’s Asiaweek as well. What was the point reading the newspaper each day in a place not your home? Even if you lived there? She didn’t mind if he reported to her certain miscellaneous events, but she’d forbidden him to mention news of any obscene Malaysian celebrations. Kim was made uncomfortable by the Islamic influences around them, the crying of the mosques and the public ceremonies of circumcision for thirteen-year-old princes. However, this place suited her. Her vigor had returned—as if from her teens. Dr. Bourgois treated her with free medicines from his hospital, and Kuala Lumpur was full of Chinese herbalists who kept her in health. Several promised immunity to everything. She didn’t want it. If illness didn’t kill you, you died of bad luck.
Her husband stopped reading and raised his face to her. He reached for his empty teacup and looked down into it, as if a sudden need to examine it had stopped his reading.
Kim said, “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s something. Don’t say it’s nothing.”
“Someone from Saigon.”
She stood behind him. He covered part of the page with his hand, and she reached over his shoulder and moved it away. “The Canadian?”
“An American.”
“No. It says ‘Canadian.’ I can read ‘Canadian.’ And ‘Benét.’”
“He’s not Canadian. And that’s not his name. But I remember him. I knew him.”
“Where? Here in Kuala Lumpur?”
“Back home.”
“Then don’t think about it.”
Don’t think about it? But I do. I think about luck … sorrow … gratitude … all mixed in a poison. And we drink it.
Luck and the sacrifice of others had brought them to live here in the servants’ quarters behind the house of the physician from Marseilles. Kim did the laundry and sometimes went about the doctor’s house dusting things, as she’d done all her life, though the doctor had other servants for that; and Hao drove the car. He took the girls to and from school and to piano lessons and dancing lessons. The young girls went to the American School and spoke very good English. With the parents Hao communicated in French. Dr. Bourgois walked a few blocks each day to and from the hospital where he worked as an administrator. Hao drove the wife to shopping, to the bridge club, and to the bookstores. All thanks to luck, and the sacrifice of others. But some of those others hadn’t, themselves, chosen sacrifice. He’d chosen it for them. And there came sorrow. The trick he’d played Trung Than—the lowest thing he’d ever done. Yet not at all difficult. The Americans had made it easy. His most terrible crime, and where had it led? The Americans had thrown Trung into a prison camp and he’d come out a hero of the cause, with a house in Saigon and membership in the party. Historians came asking for interviews. Good for Trung. He’d dodged the wind. And Saigon was Ho Chi Minh City.
Some of those others had chosen sacrifice willingly, however, with the strength of their hearts; and there came gratitude. For the colonel. For the infantryman who’d thrown his helmet over the grenade and then himself over the helmet. And for the other Americans who’d helped them get away. The Americans had remembered, had kept their promises to him, and even to his country. They hadn’t failed to keep such a promise. They’d simply lost the war.
And tomorrow, or the next day, he planned to tell Kim he’d had word from their nephew Minh—this through a Vietnamese family who ran a restaurant in Singapore, longtime emigrants who’d set a worldwide network going to make connections among scattered clans. Minh had survived—who knew what troubles he’d survived?—and lived close to Boston, Massachussets. Minh had located relatives in Texas who fished in the Gulf of Mexico, and they might be persuaded to help their Cousin Hao and his wife reach America. And there, again—luck. He’d chosen the right side. Lucky life!
His wife had started the gas, and the kettle trembled on the stove. He hadn’t noticed. He’d thought she was still behind him, studying the face in the news.
She brought him the teapot. “What does it say?”
“He’s in a lot of trouble.”
“Is there anything you can do?”
“No. I knew him, that’s all.”
1/8/83
Dear Eduardo Aguinaldo,
You may have already gotten a letter from me. But assuming you haven’t:
My name is William Benét. They call me “Skip.” You, in fact, called me “Skip.” Do you by any chance remember me? Let’s just say I’m not the person I was back then, and leave it at that. But do you remember me?
I live a good deal in Cebu City. Lived. I haven’t been there for two years, approximately. Around there they know me as “William Benét, the Canadian guy.”
I have a family in Cebu City, a woman wife and three kids. Not a legal union. Look in on them, will you? Wife’s name is Cora Ng. Her cousin owns the Ng Fine Store near the docks. The cousin can find her for you. Last time I checked I owned two buildings in the neighborhood. Cora can tell you which ones. She understands cash better than she understands real estate, so maybe you’d be good enough to handle the sale for her and see that she gets the money.
I know it’s been a long time, Eddie. I know I’m imposing, but I don’t know who else to ask. All the people I know are crooks, just like me.
If this is one of two letters you’ve received, forgive me for contacting you twice, but I’m not sure which one will reach you. It’s no trouble for me writing an extra letter, I’ll tell you that. I spend my time here writing letters I don’t know how to address. The conditions are tolerable, washing up from a community bucket, eating rice with bits of fish, no maggots, the water tastes fine. It isn’t exactly a Japanese prison camp in Burma. Remember The Colonel? Compared to his stories of “Kilo 40,” this place is an afternoon at the Polo Club.
If you happen to run across any of our bunch from back then, I want you to tell them the Colonel never died. His body died, but he lives on in me. As for the onos folks who claim he never physically died and he’s running around Southeast Asia with a dagger in his teeth and waving a bloody cutlass or something—they’re wrong. He’s definitely deceased. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
These charges against me are going to stick. Whether they hang me or just keep me, I won’t be running around loose in SE Asia again for quite a while. So see to my family, will you, old boy?
Your old Pal,
Skip
(William French Benét)
That he should mention the Polo Club! The letter came among a batch Eddie had taken to the club to peruse over lunch—an airletter, written in a very small hand and postmarked Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Charges? Hanging? For what? Eddie had heard nothing about it. He had a friend at The Manila Times who could perhaps see about all this. And the colonel, alive? He’d never had any report to the contrary, never any word of the colonel’s demise. He wasn’t in touch with any of “the bunch” from back then, but surely he would have known if the colonel had died.
How often he’d thought of Skip Sands. How seldom he’d done anything about it. He’d made no attempt to track him down. He associated Skip with the murder of the priest along the Pulangi River in 1965, by far the worst thing he’d done in his life, and the circumstances, war, duty, good intentions, made no difference.
Eddie left his table under the awning near the swimming pool and strolled through the restaurant to the bowling lanes. The man knew his shoe size without having to ask. A couple of kids bowled in the center lane, not doing too well with these duckpins, half the size of tenpins, and a ball without finger holes, held in the hand, hard to aim, and prone to little effect on the targets. After each turn a boy dropped from the darkness above the fallen pins to capture and resettle them. As a teenager Eddie had flung the ball hard and sent the pins flying in hope of catching one of those kids in the head with one, but they knew the game and stayed clear.
Eddie bowled a line in the low nineties, not unrespectable for duckpins, and drank 7Up and grenadine as he’d done when a boy. Six weeks ago, after a debauched New Year’s Eve, he’d sworn off liquor.
He went up the stairs and through the lobby to the intercom and buzzed Ernesto in the drivers’ shack and stood out front waiting. The grounds and the drive of the Polo Club hadn’t changed in decades, and beyond the grounds, in the subdivision of Forbes Park, all was still well, but beyond Forbes Park chaos waited. The quarantine of beautiful lawns and stately homes was massed about with the choking city. He had plans to relocate. He was rich, he could go where he wanted. He only lacked an idea where.
Imogene wasn’t home. The children must be out of school by now but off visiting, or looking for trouble.
In his office upstairs he sat at the desk, his chair turned toward the window, and cradled a cup of coffee in his hands. He didn’t like coffee. He just drank it. “A letter has come.”
“What?”
Carlos, the houseboy. The formerly beautiful Imogene preferred he say “servant.”
Carlos placed the envelope on his desk. “It comes from Mr. Kingston. His driver brought it in the car.”
Kingston, an American, lived nearby. The letter, he saw, came from Pudu Prison and was addressed to Eddie care of Manila’s Canadian Consul. Kingston had clipped to it a note reading, “This was given to me by John Liese of the Canadian Embassy. I believe it’s for you—Hank.” The connection, Eddie guessed, was that Kingston did a lot of business with Imperial Oil of Canada, and Sands was masquerading as a Canadian.
12/18/82
Dear Eduardo Aguinaldo:
Mr. Aguinaldo, my name is William Benét. I’m currently in prison in Kuala Lumpur, awaiting sentencing on gun-running charges. My solicitors tell me I should expect to hang.
Mr. Aguinaldo, I’m dying and I’m glad. I imagine you at the big window of a high-rise above the smog, looking down on Manila floating like a dream in the fumes and smoke, a jowly guy no doubt, big paunch, a guy I don’t know and who possibly doesn’t remember me.
But I’m writing to you because you’re the only one who can deliver a message for me to the Eddie Aguinaldo of eighteen years ago, the young Major who fought the Huks and dated rich young mestizas and who played Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”—do you remember?—and was the best thing in it. I’ve got nothing to say to anybody else. Nothing to report to the denizens of this era, the heirs to our lies. So I’m writing to Eddie Aguinaldo. The kindhearted Eddie Aguinaldo who took the time and the risk to send me a warning against the danger I’d already dived into in Cao Quyen in Vietnam, the soul-dissolving acid guys like me immersed ourselves in while we politely covered our mouths with handkerchiefs and complained about the DDT and the herbicides while our souls boiled away in something a lot more poisonous than poison.
I hope it surprises you to learn I lived in Cebu City from ‘73 to ‘81. Since then I’ve been nowhere very long-term until just a few months ago, when I was arrested in the Belum Valley, on the Malaysian side of the Thai border. The wrong side, believe me, to get arrested on.
I’m currently in Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur. If your travels happen to take you out this way in the next few months, stop in and say hello. It would be nice to see a familiar face. You can gather I’ve come to end my life under a cloud. This has been embarrassing. Or it should be. But I don’t feel particularly embarrassed.
Sincerely,
Skip
William French Benét
He looked again at the first letter:
… They call me “Skip.” You, in fact, called me “Skip.” Do you by any chance remember me? Let’s just say I’m not the person I was back then, and leave it at that. But do you remember me?
—That one had come addressed to Eduardo Aguinaldo, Forbes Park, Makati, Rizal, Philippine Islands. No house number, no street address, but it had found him. And his name wasn’t Eduardo. His name was Edward. As a kind of mockery between chums, Skip had called him Eduardo. Skip had mocked himself as well. Maybe under the Latin influence, in these islands named for a Spaniard king, he’d cultivated a silly mustache, and Eddie had called him Zorro. Certainly he remembered the young American with the crew cut and the mustache.
He stood by the window of his office and looked out on the pool, the bathhouse, the acacia dropping whirling blossoms on the lawn, and wondered if his happiest times hadn’t come in his teens, when he was down here in Manila on holiday from the Baguio Military Institute, running wild in a city without limits; and in his mid-twenties, those patrols in the jungle with Skip Sands, the man from the CIA.
His window fronted none-too-sturdy-looking high-rises veiled, as Skip said he imagined, in fumes. Once the places with better views had looked out on fields of high coarse elephant grass, dirt roads, open spaces with a few tall buildings. The Rizal Theater had been visible from two miles off. All his life he’d lived in Forbes Park. At the edge of a burning field once he’d found a dead dog with newborn pups at her teats, and he’d taken the minuscule beasts home and tried to nurse them from an eyedropper. That’s who he’d been once.
Recently he’d been struck with an idea for a wicked lampoon of My Fair Lady—a one-act, The Wedding Night of Liza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, with off-color lyrics set to the familiar melodies of “The Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”
The trouble was that in this cultural environment such a show would be, like Liza Doolittle (as he imagined her for the purposes of this entertainment), unmountable. And for the same reasons: conformity, prudery, feminine cowardice. He felt himself unsuited for the climate of his times. He could only stand outside and laugh at his own class, the educated emulators of British and American manners—his wife, her father the good senator, all those people—a light scum of gentility floating on a swamp.
And everybody else, all his fellow Filipinos: a lot of superstitious maniacs, miracle-seekers, statue-worshippers, stigmata-bleeders, berserk flagellants running on Good Friday through province after province with dripping, self-inflicted wounds while others came out to beat them with sticks or soothe their gashes with water hurled from old soup cans, and a man in Cotabato Province who had himself crucified annually before his weeping neighbors in a church.
Skip Sands to the gallows. Me too.
Why the jolly hell not?
He thinks, I’m a jolly good fellow and an unhappy man.
Approaching the steps to Kuala Lumpur’s Old High Court on the day of sentencing, Jimmy Storm looked up toward the second story and saw a number of women in bright dresses—secretaries, maybe—picnicking on a balcony, taking lunch with their rice bowls in the laps of their bright dresses. As they fed themselves they held the bowls up close to their faces, conversing, laughing, sounding almost as if they sang to one another.
On the top step he paused. He didn’t know where to go. He consulted the day’s printed agenda in its glass case while dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his shoe, and then pushed through the great wooden doors of the Old High Court—Moorish in its architecture, tropic Colonial in its spacious interiors, resonant and shadowy, dwarfing and cooling the concerns of those who came here.
He took a seat in the rearmost pew of Courtroom Seven, where at 1:00 p.m. a Chinese gun dealer named Lau would be sentenced. Then, at 2:00 p.m., the prisoner calling himself William French Benét.
One yellow fire extinguisher. Twelve overhead fluorescent lights. A sign in Malaysian or whatever they spoke—DI-LARANG MEROKOK—which he took to mean “No Smoking.” Eleven wall-mounted electric fans, should the central cooling fail. Storm doubted it ever would. Everything worked perfectly in Kuala Lumpur. People seemed competent and agreeable.
At the front of the courtroom, a lawyer in a gray suit sat at the defendant’s table and examined the evidence against his client, spinning the cylinder of what appeared to be a Smith & Wesson Detective Special, cocking back the hammer and taking aim, for an empty, meditative moment, at the elevated bench from which, according to the agenda out front, Mr. Justice Shaik Daud Hadi Ponusammy would momentarily preside.
Except for Storm, the lawyer had the courtroom to himself. He aimed the pistol at the court secretary’s empty desk, in particular at the sign on it reading DI-LARANG MEROKOK. He pulled the trigger, and the pin snapped.
Lunch was over. Storm heard footfalls echoing through the building. He stood up and went to a window with a view down into the driveway, where a blue van was arriving now from Pudu Prison. Lettering on its flank read POLIS RAJA DI MALAYSIA. Among the half dozen Chinese and Malay prisoners he could easily pick out the false Canadian Benét, his face looking white and small in the van’s back window.
Storm took his seat again. A few people had scattered themselves among the pews by now, a half dozen reporters and a couple of spectators. The court’s secretary came, and one security guard; and then Benét’s barrister, Ahmed Ismail, entered the courtroom. He looked soft and favored, with the big, wet eyes of a child, arranging his papers before him in the shadow of the judge’s looming bench. Very plush purple curtains covering the rear wall gave the courtroom the air of an old theater, and for a moment Ismail looked like a schoolboy, absurdly dressed in a black three-piece suit, coming to see a movie.
A staircase led up from the lower floor directly into the prisoner’s box in the middle of the Old High Court, so that climbing it the accused, Lau, a Chinese boy looking around himself wildly, suddenly surfaced in the midst of his dilemma.
All stood for the entering Mr. Justice Ponusammy, who positioned himself behind a large ceremonial mace that rested on his desk. The prisoner leaned on the railing of his box, supporting himself with both bound hands.
All were seated.
They ran the court in English. The prisoner’s lawyer explained his client didn’t speak it and would use an interpreter. The boy had been convicted of dealing in firearms and of possessing a large quantity of ammunition. The judge went over the submissions, the precedents, and all the rest. The small man interpreting for the prisoner seemed nervous, sitting on his wooden chair beside the barrister and jiggling both his knees violently. When the judge addressed him he jumped up, and the prisoner also rose, though nobody had asked him to.
On hearing of his arrest, the Chinese boy’s mother had killed herself by swallowing insecticide. “He does not yet know,” his lawyer told the judge in English. The Chinese boy stood there oblivious. His interpreter failed to translate. “He will soon know, and that will perhaps be his biggest punishment.”
Justice Ponusammy never once looked at the prisoner. He gave him six years and six strokes of the rattan cane, and three more years for the ammunition.
During the break, while they waited for the prisoner Benét to be brought up, Storm went forward and approached the lawyer Ismail. “My name is Storm.”
“Mr. Storm. Yes.”
“Your client. Benét.”
“Yes.”
“Is he coming up?”
“Yes, in five minutes’ time.”
“Can you give him a message for me? A message from Storm?”
“Tell Benét I’m completely capable of everything he fears.”
“For goodness’ sake, man!”
“Did you hear my words?”
“Yes, Mr. Storm. You say you are capable of everything he fears.”
“Tell him I’ll be at the prison tomorrow. Tell him it’s Mr. Storm.”
“Is it a metaphor?”
“Tell him.”
When Storm had found his seat again in the back, the lawyer was still watching him.
Ismail turned away as his client Benét trudged up the stairwell from below them with his hands cuffed before him. He was in fact, and as Storm had believed, William Sands.
Like the previous prisoner, Sands supported himself on the railing of the prisoner’s box as the judge entered and everyone stood up.
Sands still wore the short hair, and the mustache—no longer silly or affected, but long and derelict and grandiose, accentuating his sadness. His cheeks needed a shave. He wore a shabby blue sweater against the chill of central air-conditioning and seemed to be feeling somewhere between sulky and comatose. He was skinny and hollow-eyed and looked like he might even have a soul.
As soon as they’d all seated themselves again, the prisoner resumed his mindless down-staring. His head hanging. Really motionless. Slumped. Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma.
For three-fourths of an hour the judge read words from a stack of documents, going over all the ins and outs, deliberating aloud to himself, from the sound of things. The Chinese youngster just sentenced had run guns for William French Benét; so had many others. The judge went over the list of counts on which Benét had been found guilty here. He referred to the prisoner as “a major dealer in illegal arms; a scourge on our lives; a trafficker in our very blood.”
Storm realized the back pew was the wrong place. Nothing prevented him from getting up and sidling along the rows until he sat right behind the prisoner.
Sands turned around at the disturbance. Saw Storm. Recognized him. Turned away.
The judge looked small behind his gigantic desk. He called the prisoner “an imposter and a psychopath.” He ordered the prisoner to rise and sentenced him to be bound with rope, flayed with a cane, and hanged by the neck until he was dead.
They had the Old High Court tricked out like a state capitol. But two blocks away was Little India, where Storm had taken a room. He walked upright through crowds kowtowing at his feet in the streets while public address systems screeched the Islamic afternoon prayers. Wild streetside commerce: a soothsayer lying on the asphalt on his back with a black kerchief covering his face, mumbling predictions. His partner chanted over a collection of rust-colored human bones, including a cranium, arranged on a red scarf around a white hen’s egg. They were peddling tiny charms made out of gold foil from “555” cigarette packs and dirty string. The partner lifts the lid on a box, a six-foot cobra rises up, flaring its hood. He backs the cobra down with one of the powerful charms, dangling it in front of the reptile’s hissing face. A man nearby displays a pile, a good five pounds, of teeth he’s yanked successfully. They’re all here from the demented corners of the Far East with their straw mats and immortality pills. Various elixirs for enlarging the human penis; also, for the same purpose, a somewhat frightening-looking device of belts and rings. And photo albums showing cases that have responded. Herbs, unguents. Concoctions of every sort. Medicinal roots preserved in glass jugs, floating like amputations.
He entered a small clothing store. Its atmosphere almost unbreathable with incense. Impossible to move in here without rubbing against the silk, the rugs. Outside, the mosque still shrieking. The Hindu women standing still and looking at him. Beautiful. Three of them. One stared hard and must have been the mother.
“I’m here to see Rajik.”
“Mister is waiting,” she said.
“Through here?”
“Yes. Again. Like yesterday.” Yesterday? Her fantastically lovely face, and a deep coldness behind it. He hadn’t seen her yesterday.
He passed through a curtain of painted beads, through its depiction of the god Krishna among bathing virgins at a waterfall, and into darkness.
“Come there … It’s fine … Just here.”
“I can’t see.”
“Wait for your eyes.”
Storm moved with care toward Mr. Rajik’s voice and sat on a cushion on a stool.
Mr. Rajik raised his hand to pull a string and ignite a constellation of dim Christmas lights behind him. He was an ordinary-looking Hindu man at a table with a tea service, no expression on his face. “I’ll just make a few inquiries. Will you answer?”
“Ask me and see.”
“In the period of the last week, or even a little longer … have you looked at any time to the place where your shadow would be seen, and yet you saw no shadow?”
“No.”
“Have you seen a black bird?”
“Thousands. The world is full of black birds.”
“And one that you noticed in particular? Because it didn’t belong there—I might give you the example of a bird inside a house, or a black bird perching on your windowsill. A sort of thing such as that.”
“Have you seen something—any kind of object, any kind of … Again I’ll use an example: You crumple up a piece of paper, and it resembles someone’s head. Or a stain of some discoloration on the floor—something that resembles someone’s face, the face of someone close to you in the past. Have you seen a thing like that in the last couple of weeks? A thing that suddenly showed you the face of someone close to you?”
“No.”
“I am going to say a prayer for you. What will the prayer be?”
“You tell me.”
“No, I can’t be the one to tell you. It’s not my place. It’s your place to tell me what you would say if you spoke to God.”
“Break on Through.”
Mister was going to do a silence thing now. As if he didn’t speak English.
“I can write it down for you.”
Mister reached up and turned out the small lights. His hands rustled among his pockets and he struck a match and lit a stick of incense. The dark curved like a tunnel around them, like solid walls. Very sweaty nauseated hit now. “Gots to go, man, if you want to be fucking with me like this.”
Mister blew out the match. Nothing now. “Your eyes.” In twenty seconds the tiny red ember on the incense became visible, and the little eye that went with the voice, or the nose—this thing was the face, it was all he could see, and it was talking. “To break through—you are saying as through a boundary.”
“ ‘Break on Through,’ it’s a song. It’s my philosophy, my motto. You ask me for the word, that’s the word I’m gonna have for you. Break on Through.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
Mister spoke without urgency, very gently. “Have I asked you for any money? Do you feel I’m not to be trusted? So I say to you, come back tomorrow. I can’t give you today what I don’t have today.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Do what you have to do. Yeah.”
As Storm came within a couple of meters of Pudu Prison’s massive sheet-iron gate, he felt the heat of the morning sun banging off it into his face. The guard at the entrance slid a panel aside and peered at Storm out of the dimness of his cubicle, stared at his letter of introduction, which was in English, and made a phone call. Storm waited in the street for several minutes before the guard opened the man-sized metal door in the concrete wall.
A tall youth in civilian dress led Storm through the courtyard, where two dozen guards drilled for parade in green and purple uniforms. Ugly bastards. But soon they’d hang Skip Sands, so here’s to them.
Storm stood outside the warden’s office with the letter identifying him as a journalist named Hollis, the name on his Australian passport. A letter calling him a journalist wouldn’t do him much good. He understood that. Storm had attached to it a note of his own, explaining to the warden that he also represented a charitable group and wanted to visit the prisoner strictly as a humanitarian, not as a reporter.
Manual Shaffee, director and warden of Pudu Prison, greeted Storm cordially. “I apologize once again very much,” he said, “for our policy which prevents me from allowing you inside the prison.” But Storm was already inside, here in Shaffee’s office with the pictures of the nine sultans overpowering one wall, the air greenly lit by one circular neon tube overhead.
Shaffee was a little fat man of Indian descent with the pie-thaped and mustachioed face of a cartoon rodent and a jacket frogged with gold braid, and five different medallions on each mortarboard epaulet. Also, on his chest, ribbons. The impression he conveyed was one of idiotic sweetness.
“Are you a Muslim?” Storm asked.
Storm said, “I myself am a Christian, sir.”
“So am I!” the warden said. “I am converted. Believe me, I don’t like to hang people.”
“Please give Mr. Benét this note, okay? I talked to his lawyer already, and I think I saw the prisoner give me a nod at the sentencing.”
“It’s completely against all regulations.”
“I’m here in a humanitarian role. I’m asking you as one Christian to another.”
The warden insisted Benét would refuse him in any case. He pronounced the prisoner’s name as Benny. “Benny wants no visitors,” he told Storm. “Benny was even rude to the Canada consul.”
“What about his family?”
“Nobody comes. Canada is too far.”
“Make sure he understands I’m the guy who talked to his lawyer. I think he’ll see me.”
“But Benny won’t see you. I can only keep telling you that. Benny spit in the Canada consul’s face. Doesn’t that lead you to some conclusion about Benny?”
“I’m pretty sure he’ll see me.”
“He has refused all visitors. Otherwise I could help you.”
But having fixed on this strategy, having made it Benet’s refusal rather than his own, the warden now felt compelled to make Benét prove it.
“If you will please wait,” he said, and dispatched a guard to talk to the prisoner. The warden lit a cigarette while Storm listened to the guards drilling out in the courtyard, in unison slamming their rifle butts down on the cracked concrete.
Sands and the guard stood together outside the door. Shaffee beckoned them with a tortured look.
Sands-Benét came in barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. And it was nice to see him looking so bad, wrecked in his eyes and skinny, nice to see him looking like a prisoner.
“Can I talk to him by myself?”
“No.”
“Five minutes.”
The warden’s face shut, and Storm dropped it.
Storm said, “How’s life?”
“Boring, mostly.”
“Do you smoke?”
“I finally took it up.”
“You got any cigarettes? These Malaysians smoke Three Fives, I think.”
“Yeah,” Sands said.
“I’ll give a couple cartons to the lawyer.”
“Thanks.”
“He pretty good?”
“Good enough to get paid while I dangle.”
“You understand the deal here. I’m just a humanitarian, a fellow English-speaker.”
“I get it.”
“Benny’s consul came to see him,” the warden said, “and he spit.”
“You’re my first visitor.”
“Try spitting at me.” Sands stared at his bare feet.
“Warden Shaffee’s a nice guy,” Storm said. “That’s why he’s letting me talk to you. He wants to make sure you’re comfortable.”
“The thought of getting out of here would comfort me.”
“Not possible, man. You’ve been found guilty and sentenced, and there’s no fooling around here. Eighty-three people have been convicted under the new gun laws, and eighty-two have hanged.”
“I know the numbers.”
Storm asked: “And how do you feel about hanging?”
“No comments!” Shaffee said, though nobody had asked him. Benét shrugged. “Hey, at this point, it’s okay by me.”
“No comments,” Shaffee repeated. “But I am a Christian. I think you know my answer.”
Storm took a step closer to Benét. “It’s time to think about your soul.”
“Don’t be daft!”
“I’m offering you a chance to clear your conscience.”
“I haven’t got a conscience,” Sands said.
“So hanging doesn’t make you shit?”
“I’ve lived too long already.”
“What about Hell, you fuck?”
“We’ll have time to discuss that later. You and I. Lots and lots of time.”
“Benny’s got books. He has all kinds of reading matter. He has a Bible,” the warden said.
Sands stared at his own ugly bare feet and spoke very softly.
“What did he say? What was that?” the warden said.
Storm said, “Tell me who to see.”
“For what.”
“Old Uncle.”
“He’s dead, man. He’s dead.”
“Yeah? So were you, supposedly.”
“And soon I will be again.”
Shaffee’s unease was palpable now. He indicated the guard: “I have a witness. I am nearing retirement in a few months. I could get in a lot of trouble.” But he did nothing to stop this. He seemed incapable of the slight rudeness needed, at this moment, to enforce prison policy.
Storm stepped closer. “Will you pray?” He bowed his head. “Dear Lord,” he said loudly, and then more softly, “I know you’ve got family in the PI. And I can find them.”
He stepped back and watched the prisoner shake like a toy until even the stupid warden noticed: “He’s sick? What’s wrong?”
“It’s the power of his conscience,” Storm said.
“Here,” the warden said. “Sit down. Yes. The struggle.”
Now Warden Shaffee and Storm stood there like a couple of prisoners, and it was Sands sitting in the warden’s chair.
Sands gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and looked back and forth from one hand to the other. “Ju-shuan, or something like that. He runs a trap up in Gerik. They call him Mr. John, or Johnny.”
“Give me directions.”
“You don’t need directions. He grabs every Euro who comes off the bus.”
“And he’s the man to see.”
“If you feel the need.”
“See him for what?” the warden said. Not that he didn’t get it. He got it, he got the whole thing, but he just wouldn’t let himself see he’d made a mistake.
Shaffee had already failed to prevent this conversation. The best he could hope for now was to dominate it. “The two Australians who were executed got no help from their embassy,” he remembered now. “We’ve had a lot of foreign prisoners—drugs traffickers and those such people,” he said. “I’ve never seen an embassy take so much interest. The Canadians are very helpful to Benny. Benny’s got books, things like that.”
“You’re gonna hang,” Storm told the prisoner, “but life goes on and everything plays itself out. Inside of every cycle is another cycle. You know what I mean?”
“I hear what you’re saying, man. But I don’t know what you mean.”
Storm leaned close over Sands and said, “It’s just a machine. Relax.”
“As long as you leave my family out of it.”
Shaffee said, “We are civil servants. Please. We have our rice bowls, we want to keep them filled.”
“You’re not who you think you are,” Storm said. “You’re dead inside.”
Sands said, “Look, whatever kind of revenge you want—you’re not gonna get it.”
“Things have to play themselves out.”
Sands stood up. “We didn’t pray.” He beckoned him close.
The warden said, “I am a Christian too. An Anglican. I pray for Benny. He’s a bit psychotic. Depressed. But he’s more cheerful the last few weeks.”
Sands bowed his head, almost touching his brow to Storm’s, and hit him with an uppercut below the sternum. Storm’s legs gave in and a lot of tadpoles raced around his field of vision. He said, “Yow, daddy.”
Shaffee helped to hold him upright. “Are you sick? What is the problem sir?”
Neither the prisoner nor the visitor bothered replying.
The pause in communication seemed hard on Shaffee. He had to talk. “The Red Cross gave us the kind of report I would call useful. Yes, we have areas in this prison to be improved. Hygiene, diet, I appreciated their suggestions. But not the Amnesty International! For instance we have Chinese gangs. If we don’t lock up the members without bail, they’ll be out where they can reach the witnesses. The people making the report for Amnesty International didn’t understand this. They gave us a very bad report. So you see why we don’t want reports. Why should we allow it? We don’t want you if you are a humanitarian,” he said. “We don’t want you if you are a journalist. You are not a Christian. I know what a Christian looks like because I myself am already a Christian.” This speech had given him strength. “Get out!” he cried. He turned to the guard: “Yes! This man is not permitted here!”
Thirty minutes later Storm was eating a rib-eye steak in a place with bamboo décor but with an Anglo name—Planter’s Inn Pub—listening to a wrenchingly beautiful lament played on native flutes which slowly became recognizable in its sadness as an old Moody Blues tune: “Nights in White Satin.”
He’d already tried Phangan, the low-rent druggy island resort east of Thailand—but that one flopped. A lot of retrograde hippies with melted eyes, rip-off Indian ganja freaks, various bits of psychedelic European burn-off. Airheads. Just air. He couldn’t deal with them.
This after his escape from the Barnstable County Jail in Massachusetts: one day a door had simply stood open—surely the Agency’s doing, and likely the colonel’s—and he’d walked away.
This after the great sea battle, the only firefight of his life, in which the Coast Guard had sunk his boat and many tons of Colombian ganja, and shot one and drowned another of his crew of three Colombians.
In Bangkok he’d heard the colonel might be buying and processing raw opium in the region. He moved down from Bangkok where the whores were friendly and zoned on chemicals to Kuala Lumpur where the whores performed with the bloodless efficiency of automatic shoe-shine machines. Kuala Lumpur, a name somehow connoting limpness and no warmth, like Cold Lump. A decaffeinated town, clear, acrylic brains, the precise opposite of Phangan. Air-conditioning that could reasonably be described as brutal, everybody seemed to have a respiratory condition. Very Western, very modern, kind of an Asian Akron, Ohio, with cut-rate prices, tropical fruit, and everybody driving on the left … He’d seen the photo of William Benét in the New Straits Times and had realized that along the way a sort of psychic and spiritual gravitation had guided his every footstep and that he had bested the Assassin, survived the Smugglers, transcended the Prison, wandered among the Fools, and that he would confront the Hanged Man or the Betrayer—Sands would be revealed for what he was—and that the colonel was now possible.
Storm stayed in Kuala Lumpur long enough to get a tattoo and make sure Sands really did hang. He stayed at a spittoon for humanity in Little India called the Bombay, just over a money changer’s. They gave him a small blue electric fan and a white towel but no soap. He could listen to seven radios at once through the quarter-inch plywood walls.
The cheap hotels were short. You were always close to the street in these places, almost down in it. The whistles and exclamations, the baby-voiced horns.
The hallways of the Bombay reeked thickly but not unpleasantly of curry and Nag Champa incense. In the dawns after first prayer call he could smell bread baking on the still air. Then the diesel smoke overpowered everything, rising with the urban noise. Each cycle held another cycle. You could not break out of the machine.
He spent the mornings reading from a Bible defiled by some Muslim with a Magic Marker. Or listening to the radio. In his speeches the prime minister stressed emotional tranquillity.
Or he wrote in his notebook. Efforts in verse. He admired the poet Gregory Corso, a man who spewed out genius by the ream. As for himself, a line now and then. You can’t extort the Muses.
Or he read from his copy of Zohar: the Book of Splendor. He’d picked it up in an English bookshop years ago, in Saigon, before the fates had renamed it Ho Chi Minh City—
Rabbi Yesa said: Adam comes before every man at the moment he is about to leave this life, in order to declare that the man is dying not because of Adam’s sin, but on account of his own sins.
—read until his focus loosened and the lines of text divided into duplicates and floated on the page.
Half awake, he dreams himself coming to the colonel at the end: and the colonel says: You know there is a cycle of imagining and desire, desire and death, death and birth, birth and imagining. And we have been tempted into its mouth. And it has swallowed us.
He imagined the look in the colonel’s eyes as he witnessed Storm breaking a cycle just for the curiosity of breaking it.
He traveled the city not allowing himself to desire the women—their silk touching past him in tight aisles, on buses, in cafés.
On his fourth visit to Rajik, the Hindu gave Storm his answer, speaking again with an immense gentleness. “You cannot be healed. You are forbidden to hope for it. You cannot be saved.”
Four days after the hanging Storm took a deluxe bus with air-conditioning and even TV to the end of the line, the end of the highway itself, in Gerik, a sizable, complicated town of wooden structures and dirt streets. It was nighttime when he disembarked. He walked among the vendors’ tables in the square where the buses stopped.
Sands had been right: immediately Ju-shuan accosted him. A squat, heavy man. He wore shorts, a large T-shirt. Walked crab-footed in his zoris.
“Hey, I’m glad you came. Call me Mr. John, okay?”
“Mr. John okay.”
“Want mas-sage? Want woman?”
Storm said, “Do you have boy massage?”
“Boy massage? Hah! Yes. You want boy?”
“Is that too twisted for you, Johnny?”
“Boy, girl, fine. Anything.”
“Girl is fine.”
“Girl massage, fine. You gonna stay at my hotel, okay? Two blocks. You are American? Germany? Canada? Everybody stays at my place.”
“Let me get some food.”
“I got food in my café.”
“I’m gonna get some fruit.”
Storm went among the vendors’ tables. He bought a couple star fruits. A mango. Johnny followed him.
“You want coconut?”
“I’m done.”
“Then you can have some dinner, and then whatever you want. I get you the lady for the mas-sage.”
“Dinner later. Woman first,” Storm told him.
As they went into Johnny’s, he pointed out to Storm the establishment next door. “Don’t stay in that place,” he said. “Don’t go there. It’s a bad place.” It looked pretty much the same as Johnny’s.
Johnny put him in a room with a straw tatami on its wooden floor and a Muslim toilet with a rubber hose. “Wait one half hour,” Johnny told him.
“Don’t bring me one that doesn’t smile.”
Johnny brought the girl in twenty minutes. “Smile,” he told her in English.
“I think I know your friend,” he said to the girl when Johnny was gone.
“Mr. John is my friend.”
“I think his name is Ju-shuan.”
“I don’t know Ju-shuan. I never heard Ju-shuan.”
She too was Chinese. Thick of flesh and friendly. She smelled of the joss-house, of incense. Possibly on the way over she’d stopped to pray, or to contribute. Not, he hoped, to consult the monks as to some ailment.
“You seem sad,” he said.
“Sad? No. Not sad.”
“Then why don’t you smile?”
She gave him a brief, sad smile.
Later Storm ate out front of Johnny’s hotel at a small wooden table under an awning, on the street itself, under a paper lantern, in a storm of moths and winged termites.
He shared the table with a Malaysian man who tried to talk to him in English.
“Don’t bother me now, Maestro.”
“Whatever you say. I’m all yours!”
Except for the small lantern over their heads and a few dim-lit doorways, all around them was darkness—damp, warm, stinking like breath.
Out of it materialized a skinny European, a young man with an angularity both boyish and plainly British, coming at them like a horror-film mummy, his belt cinched and his khakis puckered at the waist, the crown of his head wrapped in dirty bandages.
He sat down at the table and said, “Good evening. How can I get served?”
Johnny joined them and introduced himself and ordered food for the traveler and conversed in Malay with the other man until, after a while, the other man finished his tea and left. “He doesn’t know English. He is a relative from my wife,” Johnny explained. He urged on them more bowls of rice mixed with a green lemony weed and bits of shellfish, or crisp pork, Storm couldn’t tell which. “What happened to your head?” Johnny asked his new guest. “You’re okay now, I hope.”
The young man had been going at his meal seriously, surrounded by whirling bugs. He stopped long enough to say, “Last week I was in Bangkok, just passing through, and I stepped into an open sewer.”
He went back to his eating. He ate everything. They always did. In the Colombian mountains Storm had once seen a Brit eat cattle tripe tenderized in kerosene, eat it like a starving man.
“Pitch-black. Walking along. Right into a concrete ditch. There wasn’t a lot of wonderful stuff in there, I might as well tell you. I’ve been monitoring my symptoms ever since.” He spoke mainly to Storm. “I fainted right in the guck, with an open gash in my head. At this minute I picture an invading horde of microbes assaulting my skull. I took myself to the nearest surgery in a cab and the young nurse told me, You should carry a small light with you wherever you go wandering. A small light. She told me when I came, and again when I left with a head full of stitches. Wherever you go wandering, take a small light. Sounds rather like a line from a musical play.”
Johnny said, “I can meet you to a healer. A woman. Mas-sage. To heal you.”
“I like the Asians,” the Brit said. “As a general thing I find I like them quite a lot. They don’t play games the way we do. Of course, I mean, they do the same things we do, but they aren’t games. They’re simply there. They’re simply actions.”
“This your first visit?”
“But not my last. And you?”
“I’ve been in and out since the sixties.”
“Really. Impressive. In Malaysia, then?”
“Yeah. The general region.”
“What about Borneo? Have you been?”
“Borneo is not good,” Johnny said. “Don’t go there. It’s ridiculous.”
“I’ve got a torch now, you can bet. And it’s no small light. Look here.” He dug a small but hefty-looking flashlight from the pocket of his pants. “Bore a hole in your flesh.” He pointed it playfully at a little child hovering at the edge of the dark. “Bore a hole in your flesh with this one!”
“Please don’t give him any coins,” Johnny said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” the Brit assured him. “I’ve got too many friends in this town as it is.”
“You have a lot of friends here?” Johnny said.
“I’m just playing a game,” the young man said. To Storm he remarked, “You see? Mr. John doesn’t play games.”
Johnny asked, “Are you a sightseer?”
“I am when I haven’t got thirty stitches in my head.”
“You are a sightseer. I can get you a guide to the forest tomorrow.”
“Give me a rest. Two days and I’m ready for Kilimanjaro.”
“What about you?” Storm asked Johnny. “Do you hire out as a guide?”
“Sure, if you want,” Johnny said. “But we’ll go slow, and I can’t climb the mountain. Just to visit the caves at the Jelai River. I’ll show you the caves, and that’s all.”
“That might work out.”
“There is one small mountain we must pass.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“The mountain is nothing. It’s just more of the same thing—up, up, up. Are you a sightseer? Maybe we’ll see an elephant.”
“I said I’ll think about it.”
The young man with stitches in his head said: “I met a missionary in Bangkok. He told me to go by Psalm 121—’I lift mine eyes unto the hills.’ I told him I’m a pagan. He insisted I read Psalm 121 every day while I’m traveling. So. Was he playing a game? Why tell me something like that?” He filled his bowl once more. Storm watched him eat.
“Because it was a message.”
“A message, indeed. But who was the message for?”
Storm didn’t tell him who the message was for.
Johnny said, “I don’t like talking about religious things. It makes two people unfriendly.”
“No, Mr. John,” the Brit said, “we’re not going to argue, not about religion. It’s too boring.”
“What about a woman for you tonight? What about a mas-sage?”
The Brit looked disturbed by this talk and said, “We’ll mention it later, all right?”
The next day Storm engaged Johnny to guide him into the government-owned forest. Three blocks from Johnny’s hotel they stepped into an open twenty-foot motorboat and were piloted up the Jelai River through a light rain by a man draped in several clear plastic bags.
“This man is from the primitives,” Johnny said. “But he is living in the city now, with us. We’ll meet his relatives, his clan. The government supports them. They live like a thousand years ago.”
They traveled upstream. The river flat, sinewed, brown. They said nothing. The outboard engine’s small clatter. Stink of its smoke. The town receded. At first, some occasional dwellings alongside their progress, then none.
Many miles upriver the two passengers stepped from the boat onto a wooden pier that seemed to serve no nearby village or any habitation at all.
“Where the fuck is he going?” They watched the boat head into deeper water and turn back downriver.
“He wants to see his people. He will be back. When we come at suppertime, he will be here.”
Storm tied a bandanna around his brow. They hefted their packs and took to the worn trail, Johnny leading, skirting frequent large cakes of elephant droppings sprouting tiny mushrooms. Somebody lived here: the wild rubber trees had been scored in spirals, and sap dripped into wooden bowls tied to the trunks at knee-level.
On the flap of Johnny’s large backpack was emblazoned an American flag. Storm watched it moving through the jungle, floating over the trail. In his own small pack he carried only cigarettes and matches and his notebook and socks and bandannas, all wrapped in a plastic bag, and a flashlight. And batteries. There was no use carrying a gun. You were always outnumbered.
The rain stopped. It didn’t matter—sweat or rain, he’d be wet. “Your name is Ju-shuan.”
“Ju-shuan?”
“So I was told.”
“Ju-shuan? That is a nonsense noise. Ju-shuan is not a Chinese name.”
They were climbing, and they were breathing hard, but Johnny stopped for a quick smoke.
The trail made its way along the side of a cliff. They remained standing, looking down on the rough green canopy and the brown Jelai River cutting through it.
Johnny asked him, “What is your name?”
“Hollis.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m forty-plus.”
“Forty-plus,” Johnny said, “forty-plus.” A bit later he said, “Forty-plus.”
“That means I’m more than forty.”
“Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.”
“Forty-three years old.”
“Yeah.”
Johnny mashed his cigarette into the earth with the heel of his black sandal. “I know you.”
“Sure you do. And you knew Benét.”
Johnny’s eyes searched around for a lie. He tried candor: “I knew him, sure.”
“He’s dead. They hanged him.”
“Of course, I know, it’s a famous case. That’s what I mean. I heard about him from the newspapers, that’s all.”
He began climbing again, Storm close behind.
“Why don’t you talk? I have a lot of information about the region. Why don’t you ask me?”
“When I’m ready, I’ll ask.”
After half a kilometer they stopped again to rest. The trail was narrow here and they could only lean against the cliffside. “There is the top. Then we’ll go down, and at the bottom we’ll find the caves.”
Storm lit a cigarette.
“I said seven and you came at seven,” Johnny said. “You’re very on-the-dot.” His face was not the inscrutable kind. He looked perplexed and desperate.
“That’s me.”
“I didn’t sleep correctly,” Johnny told his patron. “I felt my soul departing from me in the night. Did you know that I pray? But in the past few days, nothing has gone correctly. When I pray, I see no shadow on the wall—but I am not superstitious.”
“You’re babbling.”
Johnny pointed to an outcropping on a bluff across the gorge: “I see my father’s face in that rock.”
Storm made no answer, and they resumed hiking, Johnny still in the lead, his head turned three-quarters now at all times toward Storm behind him. “Look, I’m telling you two things,” he said as they walked. “I don’t know Benét and also my name is not Ju-shuan.”
When they gained the ridge Johnny shed his pack and sat down beside it. “It’s too heavy. I have a small tent inside. After the caves we can camp. I have the food. Do you want some fruit?”
Storm devoured a mango and scraped at the seed with his teeth. The clouds had parted. The sunshine crashed heavily down on them and turned the canopy below a lively pulsing green and glinted sharply on the river far below. It was his first time in real jungle. He’d never seen the bush during the war except from helicopters high overhead. Spongy and multifariously green, like this, only sometimes with tracers rising out of it, or under flares at night.
“We must get a stick. If it’s too wet, we can slip going down.”
Each found a staff, and they headed down to the caves. At the bottom Johnny showed him a square-meter hole in the base of the cliff. “The natives took the boys here to be changed into men. To go inside you have to be born for a second time. You’ll see. That’s why they chose it. You’ll see. But first, are you hungry?”
They sat on a log and ate rice out of plastic baggies with their fingers while an angry monkey tossed dirt and bark down onto them from the cliff above. “It’s always good to eat,” Johnny said. “Now we’ll go inside. We must leave our belongings.”
Storm crouched before the hole. Pebbles dribbled down in front of his face—the monkey still at it up the cliff. He shone his light: the aperture narrowed within. “Bullshit.”
“It’s quite safe. No one is here to steal from us.”
“It’s a little fucking tube, man.”
“We can do it easily. I will go. It turns to the left. When you don’t see my light, you come, okay?” He went down on all fours grunting and crawled forward scraping his flashlight along the floor. Storm squatted at the entrance looking after him. In seconds Johnny’s light was gone around a tight bend. Storm followed on hands and knees. The beam from the torch in his hand leapt at the walls and flashed up at his face. After the bend he saw Johnny’s light pointing back at him. Within a few yards he had to stretch out and wriggle through the passage with his arms to his sides, flashlight directed backward, head laid flat. In Chinese Johnny talked to himself. Storm had to blow out his breath to go on, but he couldn’t see how to back out, and anyway the fat bastard had made it through and he had to stay with him—he’d do anything to keep with him and reminded himself that he didn’t care whether he lived or died. He slid face first through darkness, incredibly swiftly. Light bloomed around him. Johnny stood in a chamber whose walls lay too far off to see. With Johnny’s help Storm rose carefully from the slick floor but could hardly keep his feet under him. Johnny whispered, “Quiet, please.”
He shone his light upward. Bats covered the high ceilings like a shaggy carpet of drooping leaves. Tens of thousands of them.
Johnny snapped his fingers once, and each bat shivered slightly where it clung—the collective noise like that of a locomotive charging past. The blast died quickly, but the darkness seemed to resonate now with a certain life.
“Look where they scratched the rocks. The natives.”
Storm examined a few barely discernible markings in the circle of the flashlight’s glare, nothing he could make sense of.
Johnny moved his light among the vague symbols and asked, “What does it say?”
“What? I don’t know.”
“I thought you knew. Maybe you know about these people from your university.”
Storm laughed. It came out of him like a shot, and the bats roared again.
He clutched his light in his armpit and wiped slick goo from his palms along the backs of his pants legs. “What is this shit?”
“Yes. It’s the guano. From the bats.”
“Goddamn. How far do these caves go?”
“This is the only cave. We can go out the other side.”
“Fuck me. You mean there’s an easier way?”
“Only to go out. We have to drop out a small hole, but it’s easier than going back. Very easy to drop. But you can’t climb inside that way. It’s too slippery.”
“Well, fuck, man, let’s go.”
“This way.” Johnny moved ahead of him very slowly toward an emptiness that soon produced out of itself a wall, and next a hole in the wall somewhat larger than the one they’d come in by.
“Me first,” Storm said.
They only had to duck their heads to stay moving now, but the footing was almost impossible. Storm saw no bats in the passage, though their shit was everywhere.
Johnny’s light wavered and tumbled to the floor. Storm took two careful steps backward and retrieved it and found Johnny on his back and dropped the instrument beside him.
“I can’t see you,” Johnny said.
Storm unsnapped the knife from his belt and shone his own light on it. “Can you see this, fucker?” He crouched and raised the hem of Johnny’s T-shirt with the knifepoint.
“What are you doing?”
He trained the beam on Johnny’s face and Johnny squinted and looked away. “I want to know what you’re doing.”
“I’m going to carve some fat off your belly.”
“What are you doing! You act crazy!” In the chamber down the tunnel the bats roared.
“I’m going to skin you bit by bit. I’m going to throw the pieces in a pile there, and you can watch the monkeys eat the pieces. Meanwhile, the ants are eating you.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Assume I’m not.”
“Money! Money! I can get you!”
“You said you know Benét.”
“Yes, it’s bad to be executed. But you have to see it was a badness of fate that put him there. It was a terrible position.”
“But I have nothing to do with that!”
“Let’s get back to your current position.”
Johnny talked a little in Chinese, and then sounded as if he were answering himself. “Okay. I know. I know what you want.”
“Then give it to me.”
“This—please listen—this was not because of me, sir. Please understand.”
“You’re gonna talk to me.”
“Let me shine my light.”
“Keep that thing off me.”
“Just to the side.” Johnny shone his light on the wall. He raised his head and searched very carefully for some sign of a future in Storm’s face. “Can I please say one thing to you? We are all one family.”
“Johnny. Where’s the colonel?”
“Oh, for the love of God, the colonel. Yes. Tell me what you want. He’s not far. Only in Thailand, across the border. You can go straight there by the trails. Let’s go back to the town, and I’ll get you sorted out. Whoever takes the rubber trail to those villages in the Belum Valley, he can find the colonel easily. Anyone knows that.”
Storm backed off two paces and sheathed his knife. “Get up.”
“I can get up. I can do it easily!” He rose with a lightheadedness Storm recognized from having survived, himself, when he thought the Coast Guard would murder him. Johnny led the way another forty meters to a brilliant hole in the floor.
Storm dropped his flashlight through the opening and followed it, feet first, and dropped two meters down into the daytime. Johnny’s feet dangled above him and he gripped the leg of the fat man’s shorts as he lowered himself until his arms were stretched full length above his head, his hands gripping rock, and let himself fall. He smiled stupidly and shook his head.
Storm said, “Let’s go.”
He stayed close to Johnny while they made their way around the mountain and back to the place where they’d taken lunch. “Here we are!” Johnny said. “You see?” he said as if in demonstration of an important truth.
“I need a map.”
“Of course! Of course! I have maps at my hotel.”
“What’s in your pack?”
“Of course! I forgot I have a map in my pack!” He squatted and tore open the flap and hauled out his baggies of grub, a blue poncho, a three-meter swatch of colorful fabric which unrolled around him and which he explained was his blanket, and handed Storm a ragged map folded all wrong. “Unfortunately the writing is Malay. But you just want to take the rubber trail and speak to the headmen along the way. Someone will guide you.”
Storm spread the map out on the ground. “Show me.”
“We will go back to town. Tomorrow you can hire a car to this place. Then it’s no more road. The motorcycle can take you.”
“Is this the Thai border?”
“Yes, but here is the village you will go to.”
“I don’t see a village.”
“It’s there. I can’t make a mark. There’s no pen.”
Storm did his best to get the map into compact dimensions and jammed it into his own pack. “Let’s go.”
They shouldered their packs and walked. Climbing the hill they didn’t speak. It wasn’t as far uphill this way as it had seemed coming out. Storm dogged him while they passed along the ridge, and preceded him going down the other side. Even on the downhill side Johnny breathed heavily and had nothing to say.
When they’d reached the trail along the river, he seemed more certain of his position. “You gave me a concern! But we’re getting along now.”
“Not if you fucked me.”
“Of course I don’t do that. We’re friends.”
“Bullshit.”
“I believe it! We are friends!”
In a place where the muddy river ran level with its banks they stopped to wash the guano away.
“I won’t run off,” Johnny said, wading out. “So you can trust me. Anyway it’s too far to the other side. And there—I see a crocodile.”
Immediately he launched out. Storm watched him flounder the hundred feet across the water. He hit a deep spot and flailed at the current, taking buoyant leaps sideways downstream, finding his footing at last and grappling with the vegetation and hauling himself out to rest on all fours, drenched and shrunken, raising his head, gasping for breath, lowering it again. He didn’t look back at Storm.
Storm watched for only a few seconds, then turned and hurried down the trail to meet the boatman before Johnny did.
All the while he hiked downriver he asked himself: Why did I mention the colonel before he did? I gave him his cue. He might have sent me chasing anything.
He sat on the straw tatami at Johnny’s hotel taking off a sock stained brown with his own blood. He’d daubed the leech bites with river mud, but he’d missed one.
Johnny’s old woman came around the corner of the hall stirring up the dust with a three-foot broom. “Ah! You back!”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
“Where is my husband?”
“Still with his friends in the jungle.”
“Then Johnny he staying another longer maybe?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
“You want tea?”
“No. I want a car to the border.”
“You have money?”
“I’m the richest person you’ll ever meet.”
“I get you a car tomorrow morning. You got some friend in Thailand?”
“I sure do.”
“Your friend is waiting.”
“It’s a definite possibility.” He stared at her, searched her face. But he didn’t feel it yet. So much closer, and he didn’t feel it. “I think I’ll change hotels,” he said.
For a dozen miles by the blurred odometer he rode shotgun in a Morris Minor. At a bridge over a river he didn’t know the name of, his driver asked for the fare and put him out, refusing further risk. The bridge’s weather-eaten boards looked rotten. Storm offered more money but the man said, “Can you buy me one new car?”
“Coward. Fuck your mother,” Storm said.
He hitched a ride atop a pile of kindling on a modified pedicab driven by an old man and pulled by an animal that might have been a donkey and might have been a stunted horse. Storm wore cutoff jeans, and the kindling chafed his underthighs. He carried nothing better in his pack, no change of clothes, only his flashlight, knife, and a plastic poncho; and his notebook and Johnny’s map. They stopped at a village two or so miles along, where Storm tried to barter with the old woodman for further assistance, but without any luck. Sapling rubber trees had invaded the roadway ahead, and his woodcart couldn’t pass. Locals came to the doorways of the hooches to stare. A man approached Storm, hesitated just out of reach, and stomped boldly forward one more step to touch the stranger’s arm. People screamed. The man turned away laughing.
Storm didn’t know how far he’d have to walk to reach the border. Less than twenty kilometers, if he read the map correctly.
The old woodman came from behind one of the hooches with a flat-faced, staring young man walking a motorbike. The boy kicked its pedal and straddled it and started off so quickly Storm doubted he expected a passenger, but he leapt on behind him anyway, shouting, “Where you go? Where you go?” It sounded as if the boy said, “The Road.” As they made for the habitation’s edge an old woman, face bursting, shouting and moaning, threw herself into the dirt in front of the bike—the brakes yelped, Storm pitched forward, his lips touched the driver’s hair. The boy stuck his legs out and tried to get around her but she spun like a swimmer, kicking in the dirt, to block his way. Storm lurched from side to side as they rolled over her with each tire in turn and she said, “Hm! Hm!” People in doorways cried out at them—people laughing—a child came out and spit at them. Storm felt the wind string the saliva out along his bare thigh as they accelerated. He clutched at leaves on a tea plant and scoured the spit away as they rounded the bend out of town. The road was red gouged mud. Sometimes a great puddle slowed them as the boy skirted it, sticking out his feet for balance.
Ahead grew mostly rubber trees. A carpet of leaves covered the track there. Light washed down among the trees. The bike thumped twice over a thick snake with brilliant bands. The road narrowed to a trail and they bucked continually over roots, the small engine buzzing like a horn, sounding that insignificant, that drowned amid all this organic life. Three hours, four hours, but they didn’t stop for lunch, or even water. Storm kept low behind the boy’s shoulders as the trail narrowed and slender branches whipped across the boy’s face. The boy wiped continually at his face and his arm came away each time bloodier. He pressed on shouting, weeping. They scraped forward almost entirely in the lowest gear. Storm smelled his rubber shoe sole burning on the tailpipe and repositioned his heels on the struts, but in such a way that they kept slipping off.
By one in the afternoon it was quite dusk in the tall woods and the road was almost impossibly glutted, no more than a path, and then they came into daylight, open spaces, gray elephant grass, emerald rice paddies. Here the path crossed a dry streambed with sheer six-foot walls. The motorbike couldn’t pass.
They dismounted and the boy ran the machine some yards off the path into the high grass and let it fall there on its side, and fell with it himself. He jumped up quickly and came away wiping at his face. Blood spiraled down his forearm where he’d gashed it badly in the tumble. He noticed his injury and smiled at Storm and then suddenly sobbed angrily. Storm took hold of his arm. “Unwrinkle your soul, man. You ain’t dead. Fuck,” he said, “it’s deep.” He untied the bandanna from his brow to bind the wound and had hardly finished knotting its ends when the kid turned to lead the way again. They clambered down one side of the creek and up the other. Storm tried him—”Kid. Kid. I want to give you money, money”—but the boy didn’t answer or pause, and they continued along the dikes of paddies and into a village where everything stirred in the afternoon wind.
On the porch of a wooden home stood a man in brown slacks and a blue shirt, like anyone on the corner of any city. “Welcome to you! Come in for some teatime and I will show you my specimens.”
“We need water.”
“Come into my museum. Please. Come.”
He ushered them into something on the order of a café without chairs, only several tables with big jars standing on them. He lifted a large one, in it a brown insect as long as his forearm, maybe, if it hadn’t been curled like a bracelet and floating in what looked like old piss. “I have quite a collection of insects. This centipede killed a thirteen-year-old boy.”
“What about some water.”
“Do you want me to boil it first? Because you are American.” His eyebrows pulled apart and crashed together as he talked. Bug eyes and fat lips. Big forehead. Except for the fat lips, he resembled one of his specimens.
“Just fill my jug. Please, I mean. I got the shit to fix it with.”
The strange man took Storm’s canteen through the doorway into his kitchen, in which a cot and stove were visible, and immersed it in a galvanized washtub and held it under. Storm followed him, twisted the dripping canteen from his grasp, and dosed it with two tabs. He screwed shut the lid and shook it. “Fuck, I’m thirsty.”
“I believe it, yes,” said the man.
They stood among the specimens, and Storm drank off half in a series of violent swallows and handed the canteen to the kid, who drank briefly, exhaled and inhaled deeply as it came away from his mouth, and grimaced in surprise.
“That’s iodine.”
“Yes,” the man said, and spoke in Malay with the kid.
“He will not tell me his name. That is his privilege. I am Dr. Mahathir. And may I ask your name also?”
“Jimmy.”
“Jimmy. Yes. You say a bad word a lot, Jimmy. You say ‘shit.’ Isn’t this a bad word?”
“I’m a fucking foulmouth. Where do you get these jars, man?”
“I am a scientist. An entomologist.”
“So you shit big jars out your ass?”
“Oh!—these jars. I have twenty-six of them. People sell them to me. They realize an entomologist requires jars for the specimens. Here is a scorpion.”
“Yeah. How many thirteen-year-olds did he kill?”
“The bite isn’t fatal. Only numbing you for a time. Swelling at the site of the puncture. It’s the largest scorpion to be found in this region. Therefore, yes, I preserve it.”
“Formaldehyde, right?”
“Yes. Formaldehyde.”
“Is that shit antiseptic?”
“Of course.”
“Have you got a jug of clean stuff? This guy ripped his arm open.”
“Yes, I saw that plainly.” He spoke to the kid, who held out his arm while gently the scientist unwound the bandanna from the wound. “Nothing to it. We’ll clean the damage, and put some sutures. I can do it.”
“Medical sutures? You have the stuff?”
“No. Needle and thread.”
“What about Xylocaine?”
“No.”
“You better explain that to him, Doc.”
They spoke, and the kid continued to seem very upset.
“He says he must hide the wound. His body must have no blemish.”
“No blemish? Look at his face. He scratched the shit out of it banging through the bush like he had a grenade up his ass.”
“I don’t know. It’s his belief.”
“He’ll get you stitched up,” Storm explained to the kid as the doctor found his materials in the kitchen. “It’s gonna be unpleasant.”
The doctor came back dragging a bench with one hand and carrying a Pepsi bottle in the other. Between his lips he gripped a needle, thread hanging down from it. “Sit here, please.” He and the boy sat on the dirt floor and he rested the boy’s arm across the bench and lowered his suturing materials down into the bottle’s mouth. “I’m going to sterilize,” he said, and fished out the needle by its thread and immediately pinched closed the wound and ran the needle through the flesh. The kid inhaled through his teeth with a hiss, nothing more. “He is a stoic,” the scientist said.
“Can you talk to this guy? Translate for me, man.”
“Of course.”
“First off, who was that old woman he ran over with his motorbike?”
The two spoke, and the scientist said, “It was his grandmother.”
“You’re shitting me. Who is this guy?”
“He is not permitted to tell us his actual name. I know who he is. I have heard of him. He’s traveling to a village up ahead.”
In silence, except for the boy’s hissing with each suture, the scientist finished his work. The wound was bloodless now, closed with five tight blue knots. Storm said, “That’s some number one stuff. You’re Elvis.”
“Yes. It’s good. Thank you.”
The boy stood up and said a few words.
“He says that from here we must walk.”
“No shit? We’ve been walking for an hour already.”
“Tomorrow is an important ceremony. This man has made a very serious bargain to participate.”
“Where does this happen? He said ‘The Road.’”
“Yes. I will write it for you. You can spell it this way.” With his finger he gouged at the hardened film of dust on his tabletop, among the floating monstrosities: The Roo. “I will go also.”
“Can we get a car?”
“We can only walk. It’s a few hours, but very easy. You see, we are on a plain. Then we go down to the valley.”
“All right, fuck it, let’s walk.”
“You are going to accompany us?”
“No, man. You are the fucking new guy. I’m already on this ride.”
The scientist rubbed his hands together and frowned. “All right! You can accompany us for a while, Jimmy, okay?”
The boy had already walked out the door. Storm followed, and Dr. Mahathir caught up to them on the path as it gave over again to paddies outside the village. “Do you have water in your canteen?”
“I’m half full.”
“It’s enough.”
The boy did not look back at them. He pulled his shirt on over his head without pausing or even slowing down. The three clambered along at such a pace none of them had breath to speak until they’d regained the path after half a kilometer of successive dikes and ditches. Mahathir called after him in Malay with a plea in his voice.
“I have told him we must stop to rest at the next place. I think he will allow it.”
“Señor, what is this kid up to? Ask him to tell me what he’s doing.”
“He cannot answer you. From this place until we reach that place, he must keep his silence.”
“What for?”
“He has a function to perform. There will be a ceremony.”
“What kind of ceremony would that be, Mr. Bugs?”
“It’s very unusual. It is not often to happen. I will observe it.”
At the next village they stopped outside a small wooden house and sat on two benches in the shade and drank iced tea without ice. The entomologist said, “It is a hot day.”
“Damn right.”
“Here is a good place. It’s far enough for you. Can you rest?”
“No way I stay here. I’m going farther than you.”
“Farther will be Thailand.”
“If that’s what it takes.”
Mahathir hunched his shoulders and sipped tea from his plastic glass, looking as if it tasted bad. He knit his brow, cleared his throat, poured out the last drops on the ground, and wiped down the glass with the hem of his undershirt, making sure to keep his dress shirt clean.
They all three rose and began walking. When they reached the last house at the edge of the village Mahathir halted, wrapped his arms around himself, and said, “Excuse me, Jimmy. I think you should not go on from here. No, you must not come now. I’m very sorry to bring you here.”
The boy was getting away. “Let’s go, Doc. I gotta talk to some people.”
“This is not the proper day for you to do it. Do it another day, okay?”
They’d left behind them the shade trees of the village, and they passed now among scrubby bushes streaked with rain-washed dust. “This is bad, it’s even terrible. Yes, it’s terrible,” Mahathir said.
They began the descent into the Belum Valley.
“There he is,” Storm said, “there he is.”
“Who is there?”
Before them stretched the jungle canopy beneath which in a substratum invisible to the eyes of Disneyland right now MIAs were getting the fuck tortured out of them.
“Who is there?”
“Let’s go. This kid ain’t waiting.”
The path descended gradually, cutting along the side of the hill, or the mountain, Storm didn’t know which it was, because even on the steep decline the trees grew tall enough to hide both the sky and the valley’s bed. After another kilometer they came onto a grassy flat. The path took them toward a clearing and some dwellings, hooches of woven straw and batten, roofed with galvanize. He heard the river somewhere and some birds or perhaps people.
“The boy will stop here. I am stopping here also.”
“Where are they?”
“We will go closer to the river.”
A hundred meters on, beside the river, they found a couple of dozen villagers and a burn pile nearly five meters in height and twice as wide at its base. Its preparation was apparently complete. Three women wrapped in dirty sarongs circled the edifice with armloads of dry tree limbs, inserting kindling where they could. Beyond these women, men in G-strings stood in the river up to their knees, bathing, splashing water one-handed up into their armpits and dousing their heads and swaying from side to side, bent over, to shake away the drops from their long hair.
“They’ve made the pyre.”
“They’re gonna torch him.”
“This boy? No.”
“Then who?”—Storm wondered if it was himself.
“With this fire they are going to destroy his soul.”
Four men also in G-strings stood to the side acknowledging no one, as if they waited to be photographed, as did the pyre itself, looming like a god assembled out of limbs and bones while the boy looked up at it out of his flat face.
Mahathir addressed the four. As if he’d broken a paralyzing spell, they approached, gesturing and speaking. “There is a problem,” Mahathir said, “an infestation. They are burdened and tormented by the infestation of a curse. They say if we look we’ll see the teeth marks on their possessions. What is the infestation? One says monkeys, some are saying rodents. They will not say. They are angry because of fear. They will lose everything. They will starve.”
One man came close and spoke only to Mahathir. “He says the priest is waiting in a special place. We can go see him.”
Storm and Mahathir and the boy passed through the collection of dwellings, the entomologist leading along a path to a small clearing where they found three very small hooches and one man in a G-string standing around by himself.
“Another fucker with no clothes.”
“He is the priest, especially hired for this important ceremony. But don’t worry. He is a false priest. He is a charlatan.”
The boy stopped walking some yards from the little savage, who crouched as if about to leap violently into the air, and studied him.
Mahathir put his hand on Storm’s arm. “Stay here. It’s not for us.”
After some seconds the priest relaxed and stood upright again and approached Storm and Mahathir, giving the boy a wide berth. To Storm he held out both his hands as if expecting Storm to take them, but they were filthy with mud.
“Tell him if he wants to shake, he’d better wash up first.”
“They must dig for larvae. Don’t be alarmed. It’s good protein. Better than rice. Rice gives energy, not strength. But it’s a good source of carbohydrate.”
The men by the river had worn burlap over their groins, but the priest’s G-string was woven in a complicated pattern of reds, greens, browns. Mahathir spoke to him at length, interrupting frequently. Plainly the scientist was excited.
“There is a kind of animal,” he told Storm, “a monkey. These people call him sanan. I don’t know what it means. It’s their language. They believe he is a small man, a human being. This sanan is making war against them now. One month ago, I think two month ago at least, almost one thousand of sanan came to this place and they are eating any plants to eat, and the people cannot eat and they had only some rice. And he says also one months ago these one thousand of sanan attacked the village and stole the rice and destroyed their belongings. Also, he says, the sanan bited many people and tore some babies open.” The man spoke. “I don’t know if fatally. He says they came like a typhoon. From every side. Nothing to escape.” The man pointed up the valley while speaking. “He says that a child is missing. The sanan took the child away. Another child was taken, but she was found the next morning alive. I think he is exaggerating. For a visitor they like to make it seem exciting. How could one thousand sanan live together? There’s not enough for sustenance. I know these monkeys. They subsist in a size of two dozen creatures. That’s their limit. This monkey has a white face with a lot of hair on it, white hair. He looks very intelligent, with a cruel expression at all times. He’s not a person. They think sanan is a small human. Well, this man is required to say such things. It’s how he makes a living. These people are superstitious. They will pay him. And even more to the young man.”
Meanwhile the boy stood alone some ways off. The man spoke while regarding him. “He says we must not talk to this boy because he has made a very serious bargain. Also he wants to know about you,” Mahathir told Storm. “He asks if you are a friend of the white man on the other side.”
“What other side.”
“Across the valley.”
“I’m not anybody’s friend.”
“If you go there, you will be in Thailand.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It is another place, that’s all.”
“I’ll stay here tonight.”
“The ceremony is tomorrow. It must come at sunset and finish in darkness.”
“In one of these huts. We can stay too.”
“I could use some food.”
“They have nothing. But there is a store.”
They returned to the village. The sun had passed below the hills opposite. The village vendor had raised his awning and lit a lantern and stood silhouetted in its glow, the president of a few canned goods and packages on two rough shelves. Storm bought a pack of 555s and a bottle of Tiger Beer probably years old, its flaking decal barely legible. It tasted no worse than a fresh one.
“They have gathered together all their ornaments and precious stones, and they put it together with all the rubber they collected for a year, and they came and sold everything in my village where I met you. I saw their headman when he came to sell. That’s how I learned about this boy. He’s going to be paid. This boy will make a lot of money. But he will destroy his soul.”
“It’s like that all over, man.”
Storm drank his beer quickly and in the last light the three made their way back to the priest’s domain and they retired to the hooches, Mahathir and the priest each alone, while Storm and the boy shared the third. They lay in hammocks while pungent embers smoked in a stone hibachi beneath them to fend off malaria. Storm soaked his bandanna in river water and covered his face to filter the fumes.
All night the boy’s weeping ruined his rest. At dawn he left for the other side.
Three men showed him where to cross the river at a narrow place. One waded in up to his waist, laughing, arms raised, to demonstrate its depth. Storm believed the other two wanted to show him an alternate crossing as well, but as the path up the mountainside opposite was visible from here, he waved and bowed and showed his middle finger, bared his feet, and forged across through a slow current with shoes and socks held high in one hand and his pack in the other. At the opposite bank he tossed his gear onto land and followed it ashore and examined his legs for leeches and found none. The men hooted encouragement while he tied his laces and as he climbed the path and until he was out of sight watched him possessively, as if they’d fashioned him and sent him forth.
High cumulus clouds in a rare blue sky. He still had the morning shade from the mountain. He went quickly. After an hour the sun topped the ridge across the valley. The glare crept swiftly down over the terrain ahead and at last assaulted him, stunned him with its weight. The path went sidehill, the grade was easy, but the mountainside itself was too steep for trees. Wherever shade came from taller scrub he stopped in it to absorb the breeze coming steadily down the Belum Valley.
The path took him north until in the heights it rounded a point and turned south, the mountainside now on the east, shading him, and he stopped to sit and drink. He’d reached a vast crab’s claw through which he could see the journey ahead, the path curving westerly and then northerly, keeping level until it headed straight north over the mountaintop. On the other side, Thailand.
In the absence of further hardship, he could conclude that the encounters and negotiations of these last few days had been enough, that he faced only physical terrain and had already come into the province of whatever god had him now. It occured to him all this might have been easier—a road, even public transit—from the Thailand side. But then he wouldn’t have paid entrance.
In twenty minutes he’d rounded the rim and climbed over the northern ridge to overlook a two-acre saddle of ground between a pair of small hills. Higher mountains in the distance. Below him, a tin-roofed wooden house and a small barn or shed. A narrow creek descended the western rise and cut behind the house and down over the saddle’s lip. Stunted chickens jerked along among the stilts of the house getting at food. Storm heard a goat bleating not far off.
He headed for the creek. Looking for a place he might fall and put his mouth in it, he followed the water around the clearing’s edge. Twenty meters from the two buildings he stopped. Out front of the larger one, under its thatched awning, in such a breeze as to keep the mosquitoes down, a white man sat on a bench resting his back against the wooden wall.
Storm approached, and the man raised a limp hand in greeting. He wore a light blue sports shirt, gray pants freshly washed and pressed, and rope sandals. Thin, with a fringe of silver hair surrounding a sunburned baldness. One leg crossed over his knee.
“Yow, Bwana.”
“Good afternoon. Such welcome as we can muster is yours.”
“Are you British?”
“I am, in fact.”
“You need one of those British bwana helmets.”
“A pith helmet? I have two. Can I offer you one?”
“Why aren’t you wearing one?”
“No need. I’m enjoying a bit of shade.”
“What else are you doing?”
The man shrugged.
Storm said, “I hiked up from the village—The Roo.”
“Ah, yes. A gentle people.”
“Who.”
“The Roo.”
“Yeah. Right on.”
“They don’t eat their neighbors. Or shrink their heads.”
“They don’t. I dig that about them. Are you by yourself?”
“At the moment.”
“Who else lives here?”
The man uncrossed his legs, placed his hands on either side of him, and sat up stiff-armed, his shoulders hunched. “I’ve had some lunch, but you must be hungry.”
“I’m on a fast.”
“Then I’m thinking you might like some tea.”
“You got ice?”
“No. It’s the temperature of the creek. Which is fairly cool. It comes from higher country to the northwest.”
“Aren’t you gonna ask me who I am?”
“Who are you?”
“Remains to be seen.”
The man smiled. His eyes looked tired.
He rose, and Storm followed him over to the creek, where the man bent to grasp an end of rope and hauled out a large glass jar in a macramé sweater. “Our tea may taste a bit flat. I boil it thirty minutes. Come into the house and we’ll put you right.”
Storm went as far as the porch. He stood at the door and watched. The place had a wooden floor planed smooth. Big wing-shutters propped open by struts at either end of the room let in the breeze and light. He saw an open kitchen, where the man poured the tea into two large glasses, and the door to what might have been a bedroom. As soon as he heard the sound of the liquid Storm’s feet took him inside. “Good glasses,” the man said. “Not old jars.” Storm drank it all rapidly. Without a word his host took the glass from him and refilled it. He sipped his own and put his hand on a small refrigerator by the sink. “No propane today. Somebody’s got to bring it over from town on a horse.”
“Where’s town?
“About ten kilometers north.”
“We’re in Thailand.”
“Yes indeed. Slightly.”
Storm had finished his tea.
“We’d better keep the jar handy for you.”
“What’s your function here? What’s your role?”
He hefted the jug by its rope. “I keep out of the way of things.” He stood with his glass and his jar beside the door. “Take a chair onto the porch, won’t you?” He waited for Storm to precede him out again and then sat on the bench and crossed his leg over his knee while Storm positioned the chair so all its feet rested on boards rather than in cracks and removed his pack and sat down to dig in it for his smoking materials. Storm was determined to out-wait him. He smoked a mangled cigarette and observed the chickens as they foraged mechanically.
“I think I will ask for your name again, if you don’t mind.”
“Sergeant J. S. Storm. Staff sergeant. Used to be.”
“Do you prefer to be called Sarge?”
“No. Do you prefer to be called a spook?”
“I’m not in the Intelligence service.”
Storm waited.
“Perhaps once.”
“What outfit are you working for?”
“Allied Chemical Solutions. I’m happily retired.”
“Solutions like, We solve the problems? Or solutions like, We dissolve fuckers in acid?”
“Solutions to problems, yes. But the pun was appreciated amongst us, Sergeant, never fear.”
“You worked for the Company?”
“The CIA? No. Allied’s entirely private.”
“When did you come here?”
“A couple of years ago at least. Let me see. In June maybe. Just at the beginning of the rains. Yes. About the first of June.”
“How’s Saigon?”
“I haven’t traveled as much as some. I’d like to visit there one day.”
“Bullshit, motherfucker.”
“I hear they’re opening a Coca-Cola plant up north. Hanoi.”
Storm snapped the end of his cigarette into the yard. “Are you telling me you ran some kind of ops up in North Vietnam?”
The man squinted at him and sipped from his glass.
“What could’ve been going on up north? Some kind of listening post. Is that what you’ve got here too? The same operation x years down the line?”
“Hm,” the man said.
“What’s the situation, man?”
The man leaned forward with hunched shoulders. He seemed not so much uncomfortable as pensive.
“You know who I’m here for.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
The man sat back and cocked his head. “Which colonel?”
“Colonel F.X., old maestro. Colonel Sands.”
His host took a drink. In his movements, the thinness of his fingers on the glass, the frailness of skin covering his jumping Adam’s apple as he swallowed, he actually seemed quite elderly. “Sergeant, I can’t remember when I’ve had a white visitor before. So you’re quite unusual here. But I think your manner of approach would seem out of place anywhere. May I ask: Were you a friend of the colonel?”
“We were very tight.”
“A friend, I mean to say, and not a foe.”
“Roger. ‘Who goes there.’ ‘Friend.’”
“Cheers, then.”
“Where is he?”
“The colonel is unfortunately deceased.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yes, it’s true. Long ago. Somebody should have told you before you made such an effort.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I can’t offer to change your thinking. But it’s true the colonel has died.”
“That’s what they said years ago. His wife was getting widow’s benefits in Boston, meanwhile he was known to be living here, operating around these parts.”
“I didn’t know about this.”
“I knew about it. And I know the colonel didn’t die.”
“I see. He didn’t die.”
“Fuck no.”
“Do you know that for a fact?”
“Fuck no. But I do know the colonel. He’s doing Plan B.”
“And what’s Plan B?”
“He let himself get captured in ‘69, he allowed it, man, as part of a Psy Ops scenario, and whatever that shit led to lies behind the veil, but I can give you this much on stone-ass tablets: he’s still making it just a little bit harder to be a Commie.”
“And that’s Plan B.”
“Set to music.”
“Did he share this plan with you?”
“Shit don’t work if you share it. It’s a one-man show.”
“A one-man show.” The man smiled. “There’s the colonel in a nutshell.”
“What’s in your shed?”
The man said, “You know, he was a captain when I first knew him. Though not officially. Officially he was separated from the service.”
Storm lit another cigarette and snapped his Zippo shut. “Yeah?”
“That’s the way they worked it then. His outfit came as volunteer civilians. America hadn’t actually joined the war against Japan. But the captain had. Some of you Yanks were bombing the Japs long before they struck you at Pearl Harbor.”
“World War Two. The Deuce.”
“For you Yanks that was the best of wars. For me the best of wars was right here in Malaya, ‘51 through ‘53. We fought the Commies, and we beat them. The colonel was in and out with us all the way along, including Operation Helsby here in the Belum Valley. He and I may have hiked down through this clearing together. May have traipsed through my parlor before it existed. May have done it more than once. I don’t remember. He and I were on the Long Patrol out of Ipoh together—one hundred three days of slime and such. One hundred three days running. That’s when you know a man. If he was alive, I’d be sure of it. Nor would he have to tell me. Not when you know a man.”
Storm nearly believed. “Well, what happened to him?”
“Are you after the legend, or the fact?”
“I’m after the truth, man.”
“I’d venture the truth is in the legend.”
“What about the facts, then?”
“Unavailable. Obscured in legend.”
“How many tunes do you know, motherfucker? Because I’m running out of nickels.”
The man stood up. “Let me take you someplace. Please come along.”
The man led him beside the creek and over the hill to a water hole among a copse of tall trees and much other growth, light coming down among the elephant-ears, cool, damp. In the hole a buffalo had sunk itself, only its nostrils protruding. Storm and his host watched a couple of small children filling four buckets and shouldering them on yokes. They looked terrified. The man spoke to them and they finished their work before departing.
“Over here.”
Just beyond the copse, overlooking the long view of mountains, the man set his foot on a mound and his hand on a waist-high four-by-four-inch post staked before it.
“Here’s the one-man show.”
Storm closed his eyes and felt for the truth. Sensed none. “Never happen.”
“It happens here.”
“Do you know how many jive-ass graves I’ve seen?”
“I couldn’t guess.”
“Fuckers have shown me his bones. I’ve tasted his so-called ashes, man. I’ve cooked his grease in a spoon and run it in my arm. That shit don’t fly. I’m the tester, man. Every beat of my blood tells me he’s alive.”
“I’m told he’s buried in this hole.”
“If this is his grave, then he didn’t die back in ‘Nam.”
“Right enough. If this is his grave.”
“Well—is it? When was he buried? Who buried him? Did you bury him?”
“Not I.”
“Who buried him?”
“I don’t know. I’m told he died suddenly without explanation. I’m sorry to say that somebody could have given him poison. That’s one possibility.”
A monstrous falsehood. But who were its perpetrators? “I met you once in Saigon. In ‘67 or ‘68.”
“Let’s see. In ‘67 or ‘68. It’s entirely possible.”
“You’re Pitchfork.”
“I go by many names.”
“Don’t play like that. I met you in Saigon. You’re the colonel’s old buddy. You gave him an egg.”
“An egg?”
“In the prison camp, when he was hungry. You gave him an egg.”
“Did I?”
“He said you did.”
“Well then, I must have done.”
“You look the same. Are you always the same? You don’t get any older? Are you Satan?”
“Now you’re the one playing a game.”
“Don’t show me graves.”
“Then what can I show you?”
Only the living colonel would suffice. The colonel smoking Cubans and up to his old shit. “Here lies the colonel.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
Pitchfork said, “I tend the grave.”
Whether this served as the colonel’s grave or someone else’s, whether he lived or rotted, his zone remained. And Storm had walked into it.
“I want to see inside that shed.”
They turned from the grave and went back up the hill. The sun hit their faces, but to the east, behind them, clouds formed. Storm said, “Looks like rain.”
“Not this month. Never in the month of April.”
“Show me inside that shed.”
A board laid across wooden stays held shut the outbuilding’s door. Pitchfork tossed down the bolt and stepped backward, drawing the door wide. Storm stepped forward. In the banded light something long and substantial lay across the ground. He couldn’t imagine what. He swallowed involuntarily and audibly. A monster without limbs. He watched its face develop like a photograph and run rapidly through the colonel’s innumerable dissemblances.
Pitchfork swung the door wider.
“What is it?”
“A mahogany log.”
“A log?”
“A mahogany log. I kept a pile of timber here. That’s the last of it. Till I get more.”
Another fake and phony prophet. Another fucked-up revelator.
Storm drew his knife and grabbed the old man in a choke-hold from behind and put the point to the man’s side, between the ribs, over the liver.
“Where’s the colonel?”
“KIA.”
“MIA.”
“No. Deceased.”
He tightened his choke-hold. “Fucker, you will tell me, or I will fuck you up. Who dug that grave?”
“I don’t know.” His voice came out like a frog’s.
“Tell me who, or I will pull your tab.”
“I don’t know who buried him. And when you pull my tab, as you say, I still won’t know.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I got tired of the world.”
“Who are you?”
“Anders Pitchfork.”
“There was a point a long time ago where none of you fuckers could lie to me anymore, because I was the one distributing the lies. Half your shit came out of my ass.”
“Look,” Storm said, his heart breaking, “I’ve gotta get out of this machine.”
Storm released him. Pitchfork sat down heavily in the dirt, clenching and unclenching his hands and not touching his neck.
Storm said, “I suspect you of doing away with him.”
“I’d suspect the same if I were in your position.”
“And what is my position?”
“Unknown.”
After a minute he tried to stand and Storm put his knife away and helped him rise.
“Do you have any idea how deep down that person burned us, man? How very deep down the burn went?”
“No.”
“As deep as hell is hot and dark, brother.”
“Don’t call me brother.”
“Don’t deny me, brother.”
Pitchfork headed for the house and Storm watched him go. He came out carrying a rifle with a short magazine and a skeletal metal stock which he unfolded from under the foregrip as he walked. Ten paces away he stopped.
“I think that’s one of those World War Two machines.”
“I think an Ml Garand. The paratrooper issue. A lot of people died by it.”
“I heard you jumped out of planes.”
“You know?—in the war itself, I only jumped out of one. Captain Sands was flying the thing. My first and last jump in that war. Although I made a few with the Scouts around here in the fifties.” He raised the rifle and engaged the bolt and sighted carefully at Storm from ten feet away. His finger firm on the trigger. “You’ll be going now.”
Storm turned and marched south toward the trail, back the way he’d come.
He’d thought of continuing into Thailand, but fate had turned him around. Somewhere along the odyssey of years he’d negotiated a crossing without acknowledging its keeper or paying its necessary tribute. You don’t recognize these entities for what they are until after the crossing. Until after the dissemblances dissolve.
What could be left, what left undone?
From the trailhead he surveyed the distances he’d ascended this day and witnessed how far he’d come. As it dipped below the clouds the afternoon sun exploded down the valley.
He felt no fatigue. Only strength and heat. He believed he might make it back down before sunset. He hurried. As quickly as he descended, just as quickly the daylight withdrew up the mountain, and he saw his destiny entangled with the sun’s.
He passed into the shadow. The valley rested in a moment neither light nor dark. With the change the animals hushed. They’d begun again, the first chorus of night insects and sunset birdcalls, by the time he reached level earth. Still he saw no column of smoke, no fires ascending from the Roo.
He reached the spot at the river where the False Guides had sent him over in their happy knowledge he’d missed this most important thing. Without removing his shoes he raised his pack high above his head and divided the waters.
Nothing irrevocable had begun. On the ground in the vicinity of the tall pyre scores of candles flickered in the upturned halves of coconut husks. The villagers wore colorful, clean apparel and seemed busy with nonessential tasks, in and out of the hooches, keeping the moments cool, clapping in a slow rhythm, but only some of them, handing the rhythm from this pair to that pair of hands, no one committed yet, the thing only beginning to build. Maybe they saw him. Maybe they decided they didn’t. The priest stood next to the pyre wearing a headdress, his hair done in coils and feathers, holding a soft-drink bottle in both hands and talking to Mahathir. The boy stood both with them and apart from them.
Mahathir watched Storm come along the river’s edge and raised his hand. The priest seemed unperturbed, but Mahathir didn’t like this. “The ceremony is quite soon,” he said.
Storm said, “I can feel it.”
“You did not go to Thailand. Why? Why didn’t you stay with your friend?”
“If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”
“But, Jimmy, it’s not a good idea for you. This man has something to do. I am a scientist, so of course I can observe. But for you it’s not a good idea.”
The boy stood rigid, face pulled tight, breathing hard. None of the Roo looked at him.
The females had begun to assemble, younger ones and tiny girls sheathed in sarongs, wearing lipstick and rouge, beads strung in their hair. Small boys stood behind them, feet stuck to their spots but shoulders working, vibrating all over with excitement and childhood. So happy to be alive in their bodies, jumping around in their slave suits. Sodomizers of the True Thing.
“Doesn’t he have a special outfit? Where’s his costume?”
“He will have no clothes. He will be naked.”
“No, he won’t.”
Storm took up the rhythm, first inside himself, and then bringing his hands together loudly, and louder. They all watched him, neither approving nor disapproving. Mahathir gestured as if to silence him.
Storm stepped up beside the boy and raised his challenge. “I AM THE TRUE COMPENSATOR!”
The clapping went on, but he had their attention.
“I AM THE TRUE COMPENSATOR!” He put his hands to his sides and bowed his head.
The priest spoke with Mahathir.
Storm raised his face. “Tell him I’m the one. This kid’s an imposter.”
“I will not tell him.”
“Tell the kid, then.”
“Man, it’s no good if he’s doing it for money. You’ve gotta do it for the thing, man, the thing. You need a reason, you need to be sent by the signs and messages.”
The priest spoke urgently to Mahathir, but Mahathir kept silent.
“You want to take this man’s place?”
“It’s not the kid’s place. It’s mine. I was sent.” He spoke directly to the priest. “This motherfucker doesn’t know what he’s doing. I know what I’m doing. I know where it fits, I know what’s real.”
“I cannot say this to him. I don’t know what will happen. We might get killed.”
“They’re a gentle people, man. Gentle, right?”
“Do you understand what you’re doing? No.”
“I’m getting this poor kid off the hook.”
“No. You don’t understand this.”
“I thought you were a Muslim. Do you believe this jive?”
“Here in this area, where the trees are so tall, where the vehicles cannot come, where no one comes, this area is quite different. God is dealing with them differently in this area.”
“Yeah—I get that, man. I just wondered if you did.”
The priest spoke most emphatically. Now Mahathir replied at length, and the priest listened with his head bowed, nodding his head, interrupting at intervals.
The priest spoke briefly to the boy, who listened without protest, and Storm understood the sham would be revealed.
“Kid, you came into this business without settling certain things inside yourself.”
“He is doing this to save his family.”
“He gets the money. Tell him that. He gets the money. Hey, man, the money’s yours. I’m not trying to step on anybody’s game.”
Mahathir spoke with the boy. The boy stepped backward several paces, turned, and pushed through the circle of females and the circle of young boys and stood beyond.
Mahathir said, “I knew this. I’m not superstitious. But it’s not unusual to see the future. Many people see it. It happens. I saw your future. I tried to tell you.”
The priest stood beside him and cried out in a strangled language and placed his hand on Storm’s head.
The clapping ceased. An old woman moaned. Storm raised his arms high and shouted, “I AM THE COMPENSATOR, MOTHERFUCKERS. I AM THE COMPENSATOR.”
The priest slapped his hands together once. Twice. Again, and he resumed the rhythm. The others took it up.
Men gathered in a third circle around them. The priest beckoned, and the headman came forth into the circle with Storm, the priest, and Mahathir. He carried an axe.
It takes what it takes, Storm promised the Powers.
The priest spoke loudly to the headman.
“He tells him to assemble the gods of the village.”
The headman raised a hand and the circles parted for a quartet of women, each clutching the corner of a blanket. They laid it before the priest—a pile of hacked wooden carvings, most no bigger than a hand, several others up to half the size of any of their Roo worshippers. The four women threw back their heads and bawled like children as the headman attacked the figures with his axe. As he worked at it, getting them all, and as the women knelt to collect the pieces and add them to the pyre, Mahathir said, “They break their household gods and throw them on the fire because the gods haven’t helped them. These gods must die. The world may end with the death of these gods. The sacrifice of the soul of the stranger may prevent the world’s end. Then new gods will rise.”
Storm observed the observers. Their faces barely showed in the light of the many candles strewn randomly at their feet. They looked not joyful, not solemn either—mouths hanging open, heads nodding as they clapped, clapped, clapped—looked ready in their souls.
Then the priest stood beside the headman and spoke loudly.
“Go there,” Mahathir told Storm. “They will undress you now.” Storm walked to the priest as Mahathir said, “God help you!”
The priest held the shards of the icons. The headman bowed and pointed at Storm’s soggy shoes. Storm kicked them off. The headman bowed lower and touched Storm’s foot and pinched the fabric of his sock. Placing his hand on the headman’s shoulder, Storm peeled off his socks and stood up straight. Two young women came forward and tugged at his buttons and his fly. He thought of making a joke, but he was speechless. They pulled his pack from his back and then his shirt and helped him step out of his shorts and his underpants and then retreated into the circle. The rhythmic clapping continued. Every pair of hands now. Storm stood naked.
Facing Storm, the priest reached into the flap of his G-string for a folded sheet of paper which he straightened and held up close to Storm’s face—Storm saw nothing on it—and spoke loudly to the Roo, and showed the page again to Storm. He spoke to the headman.
The headman called out. A man brought him a spear.
The priest spoke. The headman handed over the spear. The priest skewered the page on its point, marched to the pyre, and, extending the spear as high as he could, rising on tiptoe, he jammed the paper among the logs and scraped it from the spear-point.
“Wait,” Storm said.
He squatted at his pack and found his notebook in its plastic bag. He tore out the last page and replaced the notebook and stood holding out the page.
“It’s a little poem, man.”
The priest came to Storm with spearpoint extended and accepted the offering and took it to the pyre and made it part of the sacred fuel.
Storm let it be known: “COMPENSATION, BABY. COMPENSATION TONIGHT.”
The priest spoke loudly and threw down his weapon. Storm bowed his head.
The blanket, only rags now, lay almost bare of the remnants of the gods. The priest scooped up the last few scraps in his hands. The headman dragged the blanket a few meters from the pyre, the Roo widening their circles as he did so. He made a careful business of straightening its edges and pausing to look up at the heavens as if navigating by invisible stars.
Against his chest the priest held the shards of the icons. He came to stand facing Storm.
He spoke again, and Storm heard Mahathir’s voice from beyond the rings of the Roo: “Kneel down.” He did so. The priest knelt too and spoke softly, and the headman assisted Storm in lying out flat on his back on the mutilated blanket. Onto Storm’s belly the priest let fall the few shards and made of them a small heap there.
He spoke, and Storm heard Mahathir: “He wants you to know this is only a symbol. It’s a fire on your flesh, but they will not light it. You will not be burned physically.”
Chosen to suffer penance because no one else is left. Traversing inordinate zones, the light beyond brighter or dimmer, never enough light, nothing to tell him, no direction home. One figure yet to be revealed in his truth.
Everyone had unmasked himself, every false face had dissolved, every dissemblance but one, his own.
Storm turned his head to follow as the priest returned to the pyre, where he stooped to pick up his soft-drink bottle and slosh liquid fromit around the base. In the air an odor of diesel arose. The headman brought two glowing coconut halves and they each used a candle to set the fire.
The blaze began slowly. As it climbed the pyre, the clapping accelerated in rhythm. Damp wood cracked and shot in the flames. The conflagration devoured the peak. A cry went up. As the fire began to roar, Storm felt a breeze rushing over his bare chest and heard a woman screaming like a cyclone. The priest went back and forth through the intense heat tossing liquid into the orange flames. It hissed and steamed, and he moved from side to side casting a blue shadow on the vapors.
From the trees all around came the waterfall sound of scrabbling claws and the curses of demons driven into the void.
More women screamed. The men howled. The jungle itself screamed like a mosque. Storm lay naked on his back and watched the upward-rushing mist and smoke in the colossal firelight and waited for the clear light, for the peaceful deities, the face of the father-mother, the light from the six worlds, the dawning of hell’s smoky light and the white light of the second god, the hungry ghosts wandering in ravenous desire, the gods of knowledge and the wrathful gods, the judgment of the lord of death before the mirror of karma, the punishments of the demons, and the flight to refuge in the cave of the womb that would bear him back into this world.
His poem whirled upward as an ash. It said:
VIETNAM
I bought a pair of Ray-Bans from the Devil
And a lighter said Tu Do Bar 69
Cold Beer Hot Girl Sorry About That Chief
Man that Zippo got it all across
Man when I’m in my grave don’t wanna go to Heaven
Just wanna lie there looking up at Heaven
All I gotta do is see the motherfucker
You don’t need to put me in it
Turn the gas on in my cage
I drink the poison
Send me an assassin
I drink the poison
Dead demons in my guts
I drink the poison
I drink the poison
I drink the poison
And I’m still laughin
The wind was sharp, the afternoon sun quite warm, at least for late April, at least for Minneapolis. On a good dry day she could walk a quarter mile without discomfort, sit and rest for only a minute, and walk just as far before resting again. She left her car in a parking lot and her cane in the car and strolled three blocks to the Mississippi and crossed by the footbridge. Its action as vehicles passed below shuddered along her shins. Both knees hurt. She was walking too fast.
With the Radisson Hotel in sight she stepped into Kellogg Street to cross, and a truck, one of those small rented moving vans, came close to knocking her down, braking hard, failing to stop, whipping around her so closely the red lettering on its side was, for one-half second, all that existed. She leapt back, the blood sparkled in her veins—nearly dead that time.
She’d dropped her purse in the gutter. Going gently down on one knee in her polyester pantsuit, she suddenly remembered a time when the question of her own survival hadn’t interested her even marginally. That glorious time.
Ginger waited just inside the door of the coffee shop among potted ferns. One of those women everybody calls Mom, though she wasn’t any older than the rest. How long since then? Fifteen years, sixteen. Since Timothy had marched off to the Philippines, and Kathy had followed. Ginger had probably lived around Minneapolis for half a decade—both of them had, but had never made the effort.
“Kathy!”
“I’ve got to sit down.”
“Are you all right?”
“A truck almost hit me. I spilled my purse.”
“Just now?—But you’re okay.”
“Just out of breath.”
Ginger looked around, waiting to be told where to sit. She’d gained thirty pounds.
Kathy said, “I’d have recognized you anywhere.”
“Oh—” Ginger said.
“But you can’t say the same.”
“Well, nobody’s getting any younger. What am I saying! It’s just that it’s so good to see you, and …” The work of lying twisted her features. She gave it up.
“I’m a little worse for wear.”
“It’s not crowded at all. Sunday.”
“What about over there?”
“By the window! No view, but at least—”
“I’ve got about thirty minutes.”
“At least there’s light. I mean there’s a view,” Ginger said, “but all we’re seeing is traffic.”
“I’m supposed to make a speech.”
“A speech? Where?”
“Or some remarks. There’s a recital of some kind next door.”
“Where next door?”
“At the Radisson. In one of the convention rooms.”
“A recital. You mean pianos and things?”
“I hope they have decaf.”
“Everybody’s got decaf now.”
They ordered decaf coffee, and Ginger asked for a cinnamon roll and immediately called the waitress back to cancel it. The waitress drew the coffee from an urn and brought over two cups. “If you don’t mind very much,” Kathy said, “can I have a little real milk?”
“Coming up,” the waitress said, and went away, and they didn’t see her again.
“What kind of recital is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s a benefit for MacMillan Houses. For Vietnamese orphans. So I’m on the chopping block.”
“Oh, right. Did you write a speech?”
“Not really. I just figured—I mean it’s only a sort of, ‘Thanks for the money, now give us more.’”
“The Eternal Speech.”
“So I’m sorry we can’t have a proper lunch.”
“No problem. I’m seeing a play across the river with John. A musical. The Sound of Music.”
“Oh, that’s a good one.”
“It is, it is.”
“I’ve seen the movie.”
“But I always thought it was a silly title,” Ginger said. “Because music is already a sound, isn’t it? They should just call it Music.”
“I hadn’t thought of that!”
Ginger’s purse, a small one of soft gray leather, rested beside her coffee cup on the table. She opened it and handed Kathy the letter. “I’m very sorry about this, Kathy.”
“Well, no. Why? I don’t see why.”
“It went to the Ottawa office and sat there a week. Colin Rappaport found it—”
“So you’re still with WCS.”
“Still? Forever.”
“How’s Colin?”
“I guess he’s fine, but we don’t have any contact, not really. He remembered you’d gone back to Minneapolis, and without calling or anything he just mailed it on to our office. I guess he tried finding your phone number, no luck. Plenty of Kathy Joneses, but he didn’t know your married name. Are you still married?”
“Still married. He’s a physician.”
“Private practice?”
“I guess it beats Canada.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Socialized medicine, I mean, but I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about! … What’s your name?”
“Benvenuto. What about you? Are you still with John?”
“Yep. No changing that, I guess.”
“It’s terrible! Asking after someone’s husband and saying, ‘Are you still together.’”
“Your husband isn’t Seventh-Day.”
“Carlos? No. He’s all science.”
“Oh, Carlos. Benvenuto.”
“He’s Argentinian.”
“How does he lean? I mean religiously.”
“He’s all science. Not spiritual in any way.”
“I’ve never seen you in church. Where do you go? I mean …”
“I don’t go anymore.”
Tortured silence. Kathy noticed the large number of paintings on the walls. Nonrepresentational art. This was an art café.
“Have you fallen away?”
“I guess I have.”
Ginger still had that perpetually arch expression on her face, shaded by fear—she’d always looked worried and defensive, on the brink of guilty tears, always looked about to confess she hated herself—a false impression, as she’d always been a friend to everyone. “Maybe you haven’t fallen away, Kathy. Maybe not exactly. Our pastor says the healthiest spirit is one who’s been through the dry places. But even in the dry places, the church can help. In the dry places most of all, don’t you think? Why don’t we go next Saturday? Come with me.” She actually had a wonderful face, ascending and plunging, taking you with it.
“It’s been years, Ginger. I just don’t feel the pull.”
“Come anyway.”
“I think I never felt it. I think I only went for Timothy’s sake.”
“Timothy certainly felt it! It glowed right out of him. It engulfed everyone around him and lifted us right up like a tide.”
“I know,” Kathy said. “Anyway …”
At the next table sat an old woman and another of middle age, mother and daughter, Kathy guessed, the old woman talking in a monotone, the daughter listening in a hate-filled silence. Kathy made out the words “and … but… so …”
“Well,” Ginger said, “anyway”—indicating the letter by Kathy’s plate—”So Colin sent it on to St. Paul. And I’m still in St. Paul.”
“And I’m in Minneapolis.”
“How long have you been teaching at the nursing college?”
“Four, no five … Since ‘77. Five years last October.”
“Was he a friend of yours?”
“Who?”
“Benét?”
“Oh!”
The white envelope, thickly packed with what must be several pages, its right corner covered with stamps in many colors, had come from Wm Benét, Pudu Prison, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Carefully she opened it. A newspaper clipping: a photo of a man in handcuffs. Wasn’t this the Canadian, William French Benét, who’d been sentenced recently by the Malaysian courts? Sentenced to be hanged for dealing in firearms? Canada had protested the sentence. Then he’d been hanged. The prisoner had written to her, the man condemned, here was his letter. Prisoners got all kinds of addresses, any kind of charitable organization, any strand for a man going down, but how had he come by the name Kathy Jones? The letter comprised several—many—handwritten notebook pages folded around a four-by-six snapshot: dozens of people and their wild miscellaneous luggage surrounding a Filipino jeepney with one of its rear wheels removed. Every face smiling, every chest expanded with pride, as if they’d brought down the vehicle with spears.
“Once upon a time,” the letter began—
The blood rushed into her extremities and her face as if she’d plunged them into hot water: the same feeling she’d had twenty minutes ago when the van had nearly mashed her.
Once upon a time there was a war.
She set down the letter. Looked out over the restaurant.
“Are you okay?”
She picked up the pages and folded them around the snapshot.
“Is it something bad?”
“Mom.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember Timothy?”
“What?”
“Do you remember Timothy? I mean very well?”
“Of course, yes,” Ginger said. “I think about him often. It changed me that I knew him. He made a difference. That’s what I was saying before. He really made a difference.”
“I don’t run into anybody who knew him. Not anymore.”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry about Timothy. I wrote you just afterward, but here we are in person, and—it’s been a while, I know, all these years, but…”
“Thank you.”
“He was a remarkable guy.”
“I have no memory of him.”
“Oh.”
“Memories used to come like beestings, ouch, out of nowhere, but now they don’t come. But sometimes I get such an urgent, this urgent—feeling.”
“This fist just grabs me by the heart and yanks at me like a dog telling me, ‘Come on, come on’—”
“Well, I guess that’s, that’s—well—understandable, in a way. And—”
“I don’t know you well enough to talk like this, do I?”
“Kathy, no! I mean, yes—”
“Excuse me,” Kathy said.
“Sure. Sure. Sure.”
Making her way to the ladies’ room, she set her purse by one of the sinks and splashed water on her face—thanked God she didn’t use makeup. Looked in the mirror. A bit of graffiti on the tiles beside it in Magic Marker:
electric child
on
bad fun
The bathroom stank. In Vietnam the blood and offal had spilled everywhere, but it had all belonged to God, God’s impersonal filth. Here in the public bathroom she smelled the proceedings from other women, and it was foreign.
She locked herself in a stall and sat with the letter on her lap. To read it was the least she could do. With a sickness in her throat, she unfolded the pages.
April 1, 1983
Dear Kathy Jones,
Dear Kathy.
Dearest Kathy,
Once upon a time there was a war.
There was once a war in Asia that had among its tragedies the fact that it followed World War II, a modern war that had somehow managed to retain or revive some of the glories and romances of earlier wars. This Asian war however failed to give any romances outside of hellish myths.
Among the denizens to be twisted beyond recognition—even, or especially, beyond recognition by themselves, were a young Canadian widow and a young American man who alternately thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American.
That’s me. My name is William Benét. You knew me as Skip. We last met in Cao Quyen, South Vietnam. I still have the mustache.
After I left Vietnam I quit working for the giant-size criminals I worked for in t I served when I knew you and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer. And the stakes are plain. You prosper until you’re caught. Then you lose everything.
So, what’s my line? This and that. Smuggling. Running guns and such. Once I stole an entire freighter once and sold it in China. A freighter. (Can’t tell you which city I sold it in, because somebody Our dearly beloved illustrious Warden Shaffee probably reads my mail before it goes out.) Mostly running guns.
That’s what’s got me in the calaboose here in Kuala Lumpur. It’s a capital crime in Malaysia, designated such by the same government that buys arms from America. We’re all the same bunch but, like I say, from my end of the telescope the ethics are clearer. Or as x said to x, I have one ship and they call me a pirate. You have a fleet and they call you an Emperor. I can’t remember who said it.
To make a long story short, since the days when you knew me as Benét I’ve lived under a dozen aliases, not one of them government-issued. I’ve led a life of fun and frolic, a real life of adventure, and I never expected it to last very long. When I go, which will be soon, I won’t be sorry, I won’t have regrets. Anyway, as my uncle used to say, an adventure isn’t actually any fun till it’s over. Or was it you who told me that? Anyway, this one’s over. Some of this that I’m saying is a bit of a false front, a bit of bravado, but it’s true for the most part. In fact, if this note ever reaches you, I’m sorry to inform you they’ve already hung hanged hung me—hanged me? Somebody should decide once and for all, was he hung, or was he hanged?
I have a wife common-law wife and three kids in Cebu City in the P.I. It’s just something that happened. I think she’d say the same thing. But I think I like the kids. They’re teenagers, sweet kids. Haven’t seen them for a while. Cebu City got a little too hot for me, in the Iaw-enforcement sense of the word, and she wouldn’t move to Manila. Loves her extended family and all that, couldn’t leave them. Her name’s Cora Ng.
If you have any sense, your traveling days are long over, but if you happen to get down that way, stop in at the Ng Fine Store near the docks and ask for Cora and say hi.
The Warden tells me the Canadian Consul’s coming around today and I can pass along any letters for mailing. The Consul and I hate each other and I don’t actually let him visit me, but he has to stop around anyway, especially in “The Last Days” here, just to keep up appearances for the press. So I guess this letter goes out tomorrow, and this is hello and goodbye from (I hope I hope) an old friend.
They’ve had me here since August 12. Today is April 1, April Fool’s Day, an appropriate day to put an end the long fiasco, but I’m scheduled actually for April 6. I waited this long to write so I wouldn’t have a lot of time to sit around wondering if I’d reached you, wondering if you’d answer.
Just had my supper. Now I’ll start a six-day fast and go to the gallows nourished only in my soul. So what was my the condemned’s last meal? Same as always, rice in some kind of fishy broth, and two breadrolls. Bon appet’t!
Kathy, I believe I loved you. It never quite happened with anyone else. I take your memory with me. And I give you my thanks in return.
Love,
Skip
April 2
The Warden came by last night to convert me to Jesus and pick up my mail but I didn’t give him this letter. I guess I’ll wait a few days. I guess I hate
—Someone came into the bathroom. She recognized the voice of the old woman who’d sat at the next table. “Did Eugene say what his son died of?”
“Eugene never had a son.”
“Heart attack?”
The stall two doors down banged open and closed. Kathy looked at her watch. She was late. She put the pages in her purse and got up to go out past the old woman, who stood by the mirror with her head cocked and stared at the floor.
She went back and found Ginger and made her apologies and left.
She made for the Radisson Riverfront Hotel, the first door around the corner, and in the lobby looked around for the MacMillan Houses event. She gathered the function involved something for, or about, or by young women, for there were many present in the lobby—very young, twelve, thirteen, all of them pretty girls, explosive and giddy, heavily made-up as if for the stage, their imperfections made brazen by this accentuation of their beauty—knock-knees, low waists, blotchy thighs in short skirts, probably because they felt chilly.
Following the directions of a brass-plated sign by the elevators, she passed through the lobby and down a long hallway at whose ending, at a table, sat a woman with two shoe boxes. From the auditorium’s open double doors came the kindly, amplified drone of someone reading a speech from a page.
“Are you here for the MacMillan fashion show?”
“Good. I’m in the right place.”
“A to L, or M to Z?”
“I think I’m looking for Mrs. Rand. I’m supposed to speak.”
“Well—Mrs. Keogh is downstairs.”
“I don’t think I know Mrs. Keogh. I think I dealt with Mrs. Rand.”
“Mrs. Rand is at the podium.”
“Do you suppose I can go in and sit?”
The woman said, “Oh.” The idea seemed to strike her at the wrong angle. “There’ll be an intermission.”
“Or I can catch her at the intermission. I’ll just sit over here.” Except for the woman’s chair and table, the area was bare of furniture. “Or I’ll be in the lobby. I’ll try back in a few minutes.”
“If that’s all right. If you don’t mind. I’m sorry—”
“No,” she said, mortified, her face flaming, “I’m late. I’m very sorry.”
In the lobby she sat in a chair upholstered with brown leather and brass rivets and opened her purse.
April 2
The Warden came by last night to convert me to Jesus and pick up my mail, but I didn’t give him this letter. I guess I’ll wait a few days. I guess I hate to say goodbye. I didn’t convert to Jesus, either.
Once I thought I was Judas. But that’s not me at all. I’m the youth at Gethsemane, the one on the night they arrested Jesus, the sleazy guy who slipped out of his garment when the throng had hold of him, and “he fled from them naked.”
I think you’re interested in the concept of Hell. I remember you as something of an expert. Dante’s 9th circle of Hell is reserved for the treacherous—
To kindred
To country and cause
To guests
To lords & benefactors
I betrayed
My kindred out of allegiance to my lords
My lords out of allegiance to my country
My country out of allegiance to kindred
My crime was in thinking about these things. In convincing myself I could arbitrate among my own loyalties.
In the end out of shifting allegiances I managed to I betrayed everything I believed.
I have to restrain myself from writing down every little thing. I feel I could take note of every little thought and describe every molecule of this cell and every moment of my life. And I have plenty of time. I have all day. But a limited amount of paper, and maybe your But only so much paper, and only so much faith in your patience, so I’ll rein in my thoughts.
April 3
This morning they hanged, hung, or in other words strung up a guy, some leader of a Chinese gang. They do it right out in the courtyard here at the prison, Pudu Prison, not far from downtown Kuala Lumpur, about a hundred yards from where I’m sitting, but I can’t see the rig from this cell. Cells across the gangway get the whole view. But condemned guys, no. They keep us on the other side of the building. If I chin myself I can on the bars of my window I can see the roofs of houses across the street. The first time I get a look at the scaffold will be the last time.
There’s some whacking with a cane, that’s the preliminary punishment, but we don’t hear any hollering. Anyway I haven’t. The guy this morning was the fourth to be stretched since I got here last August. I suppose he had it coming, even the caning. These Chinese gangs are nasty, nasty and mean.
Maybe I’m covering up my fear. I don’t mean to sound flip. Or I do mean to, just out of nervousness, but I don’t want you to think I’m going to the noose with a flippant attitude. Three days from today, that’s it. I die. With an empty stomach. No last meal but an unbeliever’s prayer. If you still believe, Kathy, pray for me. Pray for me if you still believe.
April 4
In South Vietnam I thought I’d been sidelined. Removed to a place where I could think about the war. But you can’t be sidelined in a war, and in a war you mustn’t think, you musn’t ever think. War is action or death. War is action or cowardice. War is action or treachery. War is action or desertion. Do you get the idea here? War is action. Thought leads to treason.
My uncle told me once of seeing a soldier throw himself on a hand-grenade. Do you think that guy thought about it first? No. Courage is action. Thought is cowardice.
The soldier lived. The thing grenade was a dud. I bet he thought about it afterward, though, and plenty. Among the people he meant to save, would have saved if the grenade had blown him up, was my uncle. Uncle Francis survived that night, but the war took him eventually. Through the years I’ve heard rumors to the contrary, but he was the kind of guy to generate rumors, old Uncle Francis. A guy with at least three graves that I’ve heard about, and probably more, if I’d bothered to ask around. But I know he’s dead and buried in Massachusetts.
I am my uncle’s legacy. After he died, his spirit entered me. He died not long after I last saw you, Kathy. Just a few months after, I think.
I think you met him once. You called him a rogue. He was one of these guys who look like they’re put together out of small boulders, with the biggest one in the middle. He had a gray flat-top haircut. Do you remember flat-tops? Do you remember my uncle? He was kind of unforgettable. He used to say, It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, Don’t interrogate your opportunities, It’s not what you do that you regret, its what you don’t do, things like that. He died, and his spirit entered me. There was some question about whether he actually died, but not on my part. If by any chance he was alive, his spirit couldn’t have entered me.
Please don’t think I’m getting mystical here. When somebody close to you dies I think it’s a pretty general experience, pretty run-of-the-mill, to start noticing how they’ve influenced you and maybe to start cultivating those encouraging those influences to flourish. So they live on our mentors live on inside us. That’s all I’m talking about. Not possession by ancestral spirits or anything.
April 5
That leaves God.
I’m dangerously close to refusing forgiveness. Dying impenitent, because of anger at myself. Dying without a prayer. I’ve lived for fourteen years without a prayer. Fourteen years heading for the other side of the street whenever I thought my shadow was in danger of falling on a church’s wall.
I know if you pray for me
Your prayers will touch God
And God will touch my heart
And I will repent
I think I was drawn to you because you were a widow, like my mom. Child of one widow, lover to another. You scared me. Your passion and your belief. Your grief and tragedy. My mom had that too, but veiled and polite. So I ran away from both you gals. And then I didn’t answer your letters. And here you go, one from me you’ll never be able to answer.
OK …
OK, Kathy Jones. Our funny little warden’s standing here waiting for this letter. Last chance for the mail train. Tomorrow morning I’m off.
Warden, if you’re reading this, au revoir.
You too. Au revoir, Kathy Jones.
If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t run.
Much love
Skip
Yes, she remembered the uncle. He was impressive at a glance. Prowess, a word she’d never used, came immediately to mind. Dangerous, but not to women and children. That type.
Skip she didn’t remember nearly as well. More boy than man. He joked, he evaded, he dissembled, he lied, he gave you nothing to remember. This current representation of himself—even as it tore at her, she wasn’t sure she believed it.
She looked again at the photograph, dozens of Filipinos surrounding a stalled jeepney, and felt very moved—more so than by the news photo of Skip, the smeary fading face and its crippled arrogance and self-pity, more so than if he’d sent from that Damulog era a photo of himself, or of her, or of both of them together.
She put it all back in her purse and sat with her eyes closed. She hardly remembered saying goodbye to Ginger. Had she been unkind?
“Are you Mrs. Benvenuto?”
It was the woman handling the tickets, no taller standing up than she’d been sitting down.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry—I didn’t realize.”
“That’s all right.”
“It’s intermission now. Mrs. Rand’s probably in the basement. The dressing rooms.”
“I’ll be right along.”
Kathy followed down the slate-tiled, echoing hallway, thinking of gangster films and the Last Mile, and the woman led her to a door not far from the big ones to the auditorium and down a flight of steps. The walls twittered, and young models raced everywhere in their glad bodies, deaf to their matron, who stalked them calling, “Girls?—Girls?—Girls?—Girls?” as Kathy entered a large, low-ceilinged chamber. Lovely models posed. Flashbulbs popped. The girls themselves popped in and out of cubicles made of dividers on casters.
“Mrs. Keogh,” her escort called, and the girls’ matron waved and came over. “This is Mrs. Benvenuto.”
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“We’re all late! I’m just glad you made it. I’ll tell Mrs. Rand. If you want to sit in the audience—is that all right?—if you just wait in a seat, she’ll call you up and introduce you after she talks about the Orphan Flight. We’ve got a couple of girls here from the same flight—from the same—your flight. Three girls.”
She referred to the evacuation flight out of Saigon, the plane crash that had broken Kathy’s legs. Forty of the survivors had gone out on a later flight. Only a few had been adopted in the U.S. and a couple, apparently, here in Minneapolis.
“Three of the orphans?”
“Yes! A kind of reunion. Li—where’s Li? She’s not dressed! Girls!” cried Mrs. Keogh.
Kathy left her without saying goodbye, because a young Eurasian girl had just passed them to go out the “Exit” door across the large chamber, and Kathy felt compelled to get a look at her. She followed the girl out and up the concrete steps, at the top of which the girl leaned against the wall in an alley, alone. She moved aside slightly to let Kathy pass. Kathy went two steps beyond her, bringing into view the river at the alley’s one end, the street at the other. Kathy thought she recognized this Eurasion child, or Amerasian, who would have been four or five years old the morning of the crash, thought she recalled her standing up on her seat on the plane, remembered her uncharacteristically long legs and round eyes and the brown tint to her hair. Kathy had seated one of her own exactly next to her in the plane’s upper compartment, the lucky compartment. Many of her own had been in the upper deck and had survived. She’d put her children aboard, helped with the loading of others, had left the plane to head back to Saigon and at the last minute was offered a seat by an acquaintance from the embassy who’d decided not to go, not just yet—she couldn’t remember his name, they’d never met again—to this day, he probably thought her dead in his place—and she’d leapt at the chance, not to escape the downfall, but to help, to be of use, to ease the terrors of tiny pilgrims. She hadn’t even known the destination. Australia, probably. They hadn’t made it. And eventually this child’s journey had ended in St. Paul. In two-inch heels and a blue skirt and yellow T-shirt tight across her training bra, with lipstick and mascara, she looked like a little whore, arrogant and sullen, her auburn hair twisting in a wind that blew from the street through the alley and down the Mississippi. She opened her purse and found a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Her cheeks pouched as she shielded the flame with her hand and lit a filter-tip cigarette. She exhaled and the breeze snatched the cloud from her mouth.
Kathy again slipped past the girl, down the stairs. She negotiated the basement’s bedlam and went to the auditorium above, a decent space for public events, with firm, cushioned seats and a steep rise, though the walls gave back the PA in a slight echo, and the mike made piercing sibilants and popping p’s. The event’s second half had begun. The house had been darkened, but lights brightened the stage, and she saw her way. Many seats remained empty. So as not to make a disturbance she took the first vacant place on the aisle. At the podium a large-jawed, stately woman with a tight gray hairdo, presumably Mrs. Rand, in a pink ensemble, spoke of orphans. Apparently Mrs. Rand dealt with a small delay, going past her text, extemporizing valiantly. She talked about the “orphan runs” that had flown so many children to new lives in the very last hours of the terrible, terrible war, of Flight 75, which Kathy had ridden and which fate had brought down like a dragon; and Kathy reflected, certainly not for the first time, that the war hadn’t been only and exclusively terrible. It had delivered a sense, at first dreadful, eventually intoxicating, that something wild, magical, stunning might come from the next moment, death itself might erupt from the fabric of this very breath, unmasked as a friend; and she mourned the passing of a time when, sitting in a C-5A Galaxy airplane as it bounced into paddies suddenly as solid as rock, hearing the aluminum fuselage tear itself into jags and swords, she’d pitied only the children around her and regretted only the failure to get them out of the war, when the breaking of her own legs had meant not shock or pain, but only bitterness that she couldn’t help the others. Mrs. Rand now introduced the three girls from Flight 75, including Li, the Amerasian, all wearing the ao dai, the flared shift over satin trousers, pacing one by one to stage left and again to stage right, compellingly self-conscious and poised, spirits quivering in flesh, and seating themselves on folding chairs so that their shoes were visible, black pumps with two-inch stiletto heels. Mrs. Rand described the crash, eight years ago almost to the day, she said—although she was off by a month—one of the worst aircraft disasters in history, she was sad to say, with more than half of the three hundred children and adults aboard, almost everyone in the bottom cargo compartment, the majority of them children under two years of age, taken away to Heaven. A mechanical failure. For some years afterward Kathy believed a missile had shot them down. Mrs. Rand knew more about the mishap than Kathy herself and described the final few seconds, the plane breaking into burning parts that boiled in the wet paddies, the clouds from ignited oil. On impact Kathy must have shut her eyes. She remembered only sounds, predominantly rending metal—a very vocal idiom of many vowels and grinding consonants, ragged gutturals, magnificent vowels, all the vowels, A, E, I, O, U, urgent, bewildered, gigantic. Then a general black silence lacerated by pleas and outcries and weeping, including her own. And one or two children laughing.
The girls left the stage to small applause. Mrs. Rand spoke of MacMillan Houses and its good, good work, its excellent relationship with the government of Vietnam. Rather than listening, Kathy prepared her own remarks, it’s wonderful to see so many, this kind of effort requires more than private donors alone, therefore government grants and legislation, therefore your congressmen, your senators, above all your hearts, new lives given hope, tremendous gratitude, no, stress private donors, the annual expense for postage for just one office can amount to, food for a single mouth for a year can exceed, no, not a mouth, a single child, good food for a single one of these wonderful children can cost about, the buildings and facilities, education, your generosity, or rather education out of poverty, your heartfelt generosity, or rather shelter, food, and warmth for young bodies, education out of poverty, true hope for lives just beginning, all depend on your unflinching, heartfelt generosity, or just unflinching. Or just heartfelt. And, no, sacrifice. Dig at them. On more than just the kind generosity of people like you and me, ladies and gentlemen, but on, yes, our unflinching sacrifice. Dig away. To her right in the dimness the ring glinted on the finger of a gentleman propping his cheek on his hand. He’d shut his eyes. Some of the men, in order to endure this, may have given up the season’s first afternoon of golf. On the women near her she saw the bright, interested faces of people trying to stay awake. A little lad with his finger firmly in a nostril, doing nothing with it, just parking it there. The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking—someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone’s soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can’t remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who’ve ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.