The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot

by Colin Cotterill

“Is he still holding you to ransom?” Daeng asked.

  “Says he’s reluctant to fly with the storm coming.”

  All three of them looked up at the single white cloud in the sky.

  “So tomorrow’s trip to drop off the girls will be our last,” said Roper. “Where are they, by the way?”

  “In their room discussing the effects of the cooperative movement on traditional Lao agriculture,” said Siri.

  “They’re still not talking?” asked Roper.

  “Not a word,” said Daeng.

  “I’m sure it’s just nerves,” said the Englishman. “Once they meet their father they’ll be yakking away like nobody’s business.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Daeng. “There’s something wrong with this situation.”

  “Nonsense,” said Roper. “All our returnees have been thoroughly vetted. I’m certain everything will be just fine.”

  It was either breakfast or dinner. The policemen had lost all sense of time. But they were woken by the sound of the door squeaking on its hinges.

  “Good morning, Comrade Ouan,” said Phosy. “We were hoping to have a word with you this fine morning.”

  None of the men rose from the concrete to greet their captor. Ouan said nothing. The normal practice was for the three men to push their empty plates and slop buckets along the ground in front of them with the chain at its full length. Ouan would fill the plate and remove the waste. But Phosy had come up with a plan. All three of them had gathered a meter of chain behind their backs but kept the remaining chain taut all the way to the girder. In this way, from Ouan’s position, it would appear that the policemen were already at the extremity of the chains with the buckets and plates as far ahead as they could reach. They would have just one opportunity to take advantage of this ruse.

  Phosy kept talking to lull the man into a loss of concentration. They had to be sure he didn’t notice that the chains were all a meter shorter than usual. Ouan signaled for Jiep to push his plate forward but the young man showed that he was already at his limit. Phosy had encouraged him to be patient. Unless he had a clear shot of overpowering the man he was to refrain and let Sihot have a go.

  Seemingly exhausted, Ouan ladled rice onto the first policeman’s plate and looked up at Phosy, who was gabbing on relentlessly, talking rubbish, tossing insults. Their captor was annoyed.

  “Did you hear me, stupid!” shouted Phosy.

  And that was the moment Ouan, distracted, reached for Jiep’s slop bucket. Jiep pounced, taking up the slack of the chain, and grabbed the man’s wrist with both hands. He shut his eyes and held on for dear life. Sihot, by far the strongest of the three, grabbed Jiep by the legs and dragged him deep into their space. Ouan was punching Jiep about the head and shoulders and wrenching at the hands around his wrist. But Jiep didn’t release his grasp. Ouan was close enough now for Sihot to get a hold of his other arm and rain punches down on his chest and gut. Still they dragged Ouan forward. Sihot connected with the man’s nose, which spouted blood, and the fight seemed to go out of him. Jiep and Sihot were on him like tigers on a deer, pinning him down until he lay flat and breathless beneath them. And they could feel the rise and fall of his breath as he sobbed.

  Chapter Eight

  The Morning After with an Orangutan

  6/12/1944

  Second Lieutenant Tetsukimo Souben’s dream had always been to be a pilot. From the day he’d discovered I had my pilot’s license and had spent time with the Imperial Army Air Force, he began to treat me as a celebrity. He had a pilot’s mind. He’d studied the manuals. He knew everything there was to know about airplanes but he would never fly one.

  In Japan, fliers began their training in gliders. Until you completed fifty glider hours you could not progress to the Imperial Army Air Force advanced training aircraft. It was a rule, like most rules in our country, which had been carved in stone. The space in the cockpit of the Japan-built Tachikawa training craft was 30 centimeters wide by 140 centimeters long. Tetsukimo was 220 centimeters tall, possibly the tallest man in the Japanese army. Perhaps in the whole of Japan, although there was no survey of such things. No matter how you might have bent or folded him there was no way for Tetsukimo to fit into a glider and so he’d reluctantly taken the second option, to become a mechanic. It was like a rodeo cowboy being forced to feed and water the bulls.

  I liked Tetsukimo but he was bitter, especially as day after day he watched the young, inexperienced fliers take off from the airstrip at Thakhek in aircrafts they did not appreciate. I sat with him one evening and watched the Zeros flying overhead.

  “How can you stand not flying?” he asked me.

  “That?” I said with a laugh, pointing at the airplanes. “That, my boy, isn’t flying.”

  He looked confused. I nodded toward the river. A hawk was cruising the air currents. It seemed to freeze in midair for some seconds, then it swooped. It barely broke the surface of the water but in its talons it held a fat catfish.

  “That is flying,” I said.

  “But that type of flying is exclusive to the birds and the insects,” he said.

  “Not at all,” I said. “Have you heard the story of Aki and Ako?”

  “No.”

  “Aki and Ako grew up in a small village in Shikoku. Aki was a good scholar. He excelled in science and went on to study engineering. Ako was a boy of the mountains. He loved nothing more than to hike for days, alone, observing, learning the ways of nature. He loved to watch the birds and how they rode the air currents and played in the wind. Despite their differences the young men were good friends and they joined the air force together.

  “At one stage they found themselves in a two-man Kawasaki Ki. They completed many successful missions together. But there was an enemy spy amidst the ground crew and the man sabotaged their parachutes so that they wouldn’t open. It was a week later that their aircraft was hit by enemy fire and the engine cut out. Neither man could have expected to survive the crash. Aki tumbled and fumbled with his parachute, attempting to repair it as he fell. The weight of it sent him plummeting to the ground like a rock. Ako witnessed this. He unbuckled his parachute and let it go. He unfastened the top of his leather jacket, which filled with air, and he spread himself as he’d seen the birds do so many times. He had no wings, of course, so he was still technically falling rather than flying, but he was able to catch air currents that slowed his descent a fraction. Not far below there was a lake and he attempted to steer himself in its direction. And there was a wind that day that caught him and projected him sideways so he hit the water at an angle.

  “Onlookers had witnessed the whole thing. They saw Ako hit the lake at a tremendous speed and gave him no hope of surviving it. Fishermen went to look for the body and were astounded to find the boy floating thanks to the air trapped in his jacket. He was close to death, broken like a crushed sparrow, but he had endured. He was the only man ever to survive a fall from such a height.”

  Tetsukimo had a tear in his eye.

  “Flying an airplane is one thing,” I said. “You sit and stare at the instruments. You can’t hear anything apart from the growl of the engine. All you smell is gasoline and you show no respect to nature. When you hit conflicting currents you call it turbulence. It’s a foe rather than a friend. And the more competent you become as a pilot, the further you are from nature. In a Kawasaki Ki you find yourself in a glass bowl with no wind in your hair. You might as well be in a private cinema watching the sky on a screen.”

  Tetsukimo began to spend more time in the mountains after our conversation, watching the birds. He started his natural flights by hitching a small goods parachute to his back and running a line from our river cruiser. He’d build up a head of steam, and like a kite, the parachute would take off. He’d travel for miles downstream and up. From there he designed a leather suit. It had webbing beneath the arms and between the legs. He started on small
hills, getting pummeled by the earth time and time again when he landed badly. But he’d revise and adapt the suit and soon was taking off from higher hills and then cliffs. I don’t know how many bones he broke but I’d never seen him so happy. There may have been an Aki and an Ako but what does it matter if they didn’t exist?

  Thanks to half a mug of Woophi, Siri and Daeng were half an hour late for their appointment with Beer. That didn’t matter too much because he wouldn’t show up at all. They were in a merry state, walking hand in hand, giggling, along the dirt road. It was only when they saw the run-down stadium looming in front of them that they realized they’d been walking in the wrong direction. So they cut back past the duck pond the locals called a lake, took a shortcut through the Chomtong temple where Private Oshiira had left his toilet brush, and, quite by accident, found themselves at the council building. They approached a young woman in the first office they came to. She was skinny enough to fall between the keys of the old typewriter she was pounding. She wore glasses with only one lens that made her eyes look like they’d come from two different donors.

  “What?” she said and Siri fell into a trough of nostalgia for the days when public officials were polite and respectful. But then again he wondered whether those days only ever existed in his mind.

  “Has Comrade Beer been here already?” Daeng asked her.

  “Who?”

  “Comrade Beer.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  Siri took over.

  “Have you heard of Comrade Kayson?” he asked.

  “The prime minister?” she asked.

  “That’s the one,” said Siri. “We’re here to pick up the documents he ordered a month ago. I’m Civilai Songsawat from the Central Committee.”

  She rested her bony fingers on the keyboard.

  “I . . . I can’t,” she said.

  “Can’t what?”

  “I don’t know anything about documents,” she said.

  “Then let’s talk to someone who does,” said Daeng.

  “I’m the only one here today.”

  “And where is everyone else?”

  “They’re over there.” She nodded in the general direction of Thailand.

  “Why?” Siri asked.

  “To celebrate the Mekong’s transition from a battlefield to a marketplace,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You must have heard,” she said. “It’s the new Thai policy to promote peace and profit across the river. Our people were invited to Nakhon Phanom to discuss ways to mutually benefit each other culturally and financially.”

  In fact Beer had already told Siri and Daeng about this new fair-weather romance. A month earlier the Lao and the Thais had been firing wayward shots at each other across that waterway of peace and profit. Now the love affair was back on. No Lao official would turn down a free meal and a few cold beers with their enemy so Siri knew there would only be a skeleton staff at the council office. They’d certainly selected the most skeletal to remain behind.

  “I don’t care,” said Siri. “We’ve been ordered to return with those documents before nightfall. I trust they were prepared before the junket.”

  “I don’t . . .” said the girl. “Usually all documents come to me for a stamp. What are they about exactly?”

  “The paperwork left behind at the end of the Japanese occupation,” said Daeng.

  “By our side?” asked the girl.

  “Theirs,” said Daeng.

  The typist laughed and took off her glasses.

  “You want all of it?” she asked.

  “Of course,” said Siri.

  “I hope you brought a truck,” said the girl.

  The Japanese documents took up one side of a room the size of a royal French pantry. They were dusty like the ancient ledgers in horror films. Siri took down one file and had to blow the dust from the spine in order to make out the characters. Of course he couldn’t read the contents but he could make out the date. There were at least three hundred files sorted in chronological order. When the French administrators returned to their posts they were obviously under orders not to destroy any Japanese documents. But that didn’t explain why the Japanese invaders hadn’t burned the lot of them. When it is staring defeat in the face, the first thing any self-respecting army does is destroy its paperwork. Siri was about to add it to his list of mysteries when the answer came to him. The Japanese officers had been too busy blowing themselves up to follow protocol. With nobody alive who cared enough to supervise a cover-up, it was not surprising the documents had survived. He opened the file in front of him hoping to find a French translation tucked inside. There were teasing general notes in French handwritten on scraps of paper saying such things as road project to Paksane or advance on Vientiane. But there were no details. They gave nothing away of either the thoroughness of the Japanese victories or the humiliation of their defeat. Siri was certain the explanation of this mission was locked somewhere inside those elegant hieroglyphics.

  They couldn’t take them all but Daeng requisitioned a wheelbarrow from the back of the council building and they piled in as much as they could. They took only those pertaining to the first six months of the occupation and the last three months of the failed invasion. But still the barrow was stacked high and they had to steady the top folders as they negotiated the dirt path beyond the council gate. The skinny girl watched them go and said nothing but, “That wheelbarrow will have to be returned.”

  The old couple wheeled their plunder back to the guesthouse, where they found Roper facedown on the balcony boards. Siri checked his pulse, pronounced him “alive but soused,” and decided it would be best to leave him there. For the Englishman’s safety he rescued what was left in the flagon—barely half—and took it back to his room.

  Daeng went to check on the girls. They looked up at her when she entered the room, not with fear or excitement but with what Daeng could only describe as resignation. It was the same look she’d seen on the faces of the animals at Dong Paina zoo. They’d been removed from everything they understood and had surrendered. It was then she decided to spend the night with the silent sisters and travel with them the following day. Everything about them seemed out of place somehow. She had to meet the girl’s father and understand why his daughters were so afraid of the world. As interesting as the hunt for crazy Toshi may have been, it didn’t trump her instincts.

  Siri had reluctantly agreed to spend that night alone despite the fact that he still had half a flagon of nectar from the gods of the jungle. It was a horrible loss of romantic opportunity. He lay on his mattress that night beneath an oft-repaired mosquito net and he thought about Toshi, the pilot. His life had seemed so ideal for so long. He clearly enjoyed his time in Laos and he wrote of his coworkers with affection. He was a military man in a war but he was stationed in a place that saw no warfare. The French had a garrison nearby but they were no threat. Thousands of his countrymen were falling in battle but there was Toshi swimming in a crystal cool pond and socializing and drinking fresh coconut water. And Siri wondered whether that alone would be enough to turn a man’s mind. Whether the guilt had got to him. Whether survival could become treasonous.

  Siri turned up the gas lamp, poured a short mug of grog, and opened the diary. He was almost at the end. If there was a climax it would have to come that night. He read aloud as if Daeng were with him.

  12/22/1944

  I had been thinking about my friend Lance Corporal Hokofugu Hama a lot. He was the victim of an addiction and I knew he would suffer tremendously if he didn’t learn to control his yearnings. But I had learned over the years that pressure from outside rarely worked. The cure always lay within. Hokofugu was a slave to alcohol and I could see he was losing the battle with his master. His favorite line was “If I ever lost control I would give it up there and then.” So I decided to put that to the tes
t.

  One evening he was staggering along a dirt track (staggering was not considered losing control) when up ahead he saw a beautiful woman.

  “I am lost,” she said, “and I have nowhere to stay. May I come to your tent?”

  He looked her up and down. She wasn’t dressed like a lady of the night. She wore a sensible frock and had a long feather boa around her neck. As she was lost and had nowhere to sleep he agreed, on the condition that she would help him to walk because, he said, he was a little dizzy, perhaps from the humidity. When he awoke the next morning, he had a feather in his mouth and beside him on the pillow was a duck, staring at him lovingly. He couldn’t understand what had happened. Of course he didn’t tell anybody. He convinced himself it was common mistaken identity.

  But a few days later, he was staggering along the same dirt track in search of booze when he saw a beautiful woman in elbow-length fur gloves. Remembering the duck incident, he tried to ignore her.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said. “I am very sad because my fiancé has found another woman and I cannot sleep. Would you mind if I spent the night with you in your tent?”

  Of course he felt sorry for her and she was far too beautiful to refuse so he asked her to help him walk home as he had reacted badly to some cough medicine and was a little dizzy. When he woke up in the morning he had a hangover that thumped like an orchestra of bongos and there was one hairy arm draped over him. He opened his eyes wide and saw that the arm was connected to a smelly orangutan. He couldn’t believe he’d mistaken this beast for a beautiful woman. An hour in the shower was not enough to erase her stink from his skin. But still he told nobody.

  A few nights later he was staggering along the same dirt track in search of more booze when up ahead he saw a stunningly beautiful woman in a full-length fur coat. It didn’t occur to him for a second how inappropriate a fur coat was in a tropical country. He was determined to ignore her. Nothing she could say would force him to take her home. But as he was passing, she opened up her coat and she was wearing nothing but skimpy lace underwear beneath it. To cut a long story short, he was awoken the next morning by a deep, angry roar. He turned to see a huge black bear beside him with saliva dripping from her yellow teeth. He could feel scratch marks on his back.