The swing creaked steadily as the plank swung in the air. The biter tilted his head and, with a swiping bite, snapped off one of the three satchels suspended from the hanger. A storm of voices rose and swirled around him and Winston, and soon they joined those voices with their own.
They lingered for what felt like hours. After that team had grabbed all the satchels—the highest weighing three taels—another foursome readied. Simian boys with dangly arms scrambled up the swing to hang new prizes.
Winston told him to remain where he was and, minutes later, returned with grilled ears of corn from a woman roasting them beside the street. Some of the Siamese pointed and stared, as if amazed to see that they ate the same food. Again the swing took flight, and again the crowd roared.
In the heights that Phineas saw them reach, it felt as if he, too, were reaching the summit of human daring. In his mind, he resurrected his own feats—running across the old field at the college, where on trampled grass his peers cheered him on to set a record in the upperclassmen race—and also those of others: the men who’d found more than they’d before known of themselves at the Colosseum in Rome, on the Aztecs’ game courts, in the gambling halls of New Orleans. And the crowds, the same here as any other. How they all yearned to see acts that defied common expectation, that could push a man across the membrane that separated ordinary life from the imagination of better. The whole of human history depended on this desire.
He soon saw the horror that could come of this desire as well.
On the downswing, a biter lost his grip. The crowd, sensing that something was wrong before he fell, burst with shouts and then exploded into a louder collective cry. The man tumbled sideward as the plank swung fast to the ground. It threw him a distance of at least ten yards. He missed one of the swing’s legs by an arm’s length, dervishing in a cloud of red clay dust before coming to rest in the road. At once, Phineas began to make his way toward the man, pushing forward while exclaiming, “Mawh! Mawh!,” hoping his intonation sufficient to declare his status as a physician and not a pot for boiling.
Some of the ceremonial guards had already gathered around the man. From his apprentice days, Phineas knew how much harm could be inflicted by aid from the well intentioned but unlearned. He shuddered as they carried the man by his arms and legs in the direction of an open pavilion. By then, a new team had already been ushered to the swing. The ceremonies must continue.
“Mawh! Mawh!” he yelled again, his palms raised high, so as to signal to the guards to desist from whatever they were doing to the man. He felt justified in his worries as soon as he reached the group. The biter was in a worrisome state. Phineas could see at once that the man had broken his fall with the left side of his body. The abrupt bend in the man’s shoulder made clear a broken clavicle. The man’s face had been deformed by the impact. A convexity on the left side of the lower jaw told him where bone structure had compacted. A long gash in the arm burbled crimson. Phineas tore off the strap that had fastened his headdress and used it to constrict blood flow in the brachial artery. The outpour slowed to a trickle.
When Winston arrived at the pavilion, Phineas yelled at him to find a cart so that they could wheel the man to the mission hospital. The surgical tools there might offer the man some hope of continuing his days.
“Kwian! Ow kwian mah!” Phineas yelled to the ring of onlookers that had formed around the pavilion. None responded. The guards remained where they stood, seeming more bewildered by the presence of two Occidentals than by the man’s injuries. Above them, red-clad women leaning from veiled windows watched indifferently.
A boy no older than five threw himself on the man. The boy’s head was shaven, aside from the customary tail at the back of his head. At first, Phineas believed he was crying, but he soon saw that the boy bore no tears in his eyes. The child scowled at him, in a rage, as if he were the one to blame for the man’s wounds.
“Is this your father?” Phineas asked, with his best pronunciation in the native language.
“Yes,” the boy answered.
“What is his name? What is yours?”
He learned that the man’s name was Bunsahk. The boy was Bunmahk. Phineas felt sorrow for the boy. He would save the man to fulfill his physician’s oath, but he would call on Him to guide his hand for the boy’s sake.
“Bunmahk, I’ll do everything I can for him,” he said to the boy’s unchanging expression, acknowledging the responsibility it demanded. “Where’s the cart?” he called out.
No cart came. Instead, the onlookers parted to let through an older man dressed in a manner not unlike a Buddhist monk. Instead of a saffron robe, however, he wore over one shoulder a sash made of tiger hide. He was not shaved bald like the monks but had half a head of hair that hung ribbonlike down his neck to meet an arrow-shaped beard and an orbit of wooden rosaries. He carried a walking stick made of driftwood, at the top of which hung a lacquered gourd with carved eyes. A dozen men armed with scars accompanied him. The old man stabbed the ground with his walking stick and commenced to shout at Phineas, while pointing at the man Bunsahk. Phineas asked Winston what the man was saying.
“He says the injured fellow here must have offended the snake god in some way. He says that the lone hope for the man is the immediate undertaking of an apology ritual.”
“This man is dying,” Phineas said to Winston, his eyes still on the old man.
“They want the man to be taken at once to the ceremonial house.” Phineas did not know how to respond to this madness. He asked Winston to make it clear that he was a trained physician, and what this man needed was for his wounds to be sutured and cauterized as soon as possible.
“What the witch doctor thinks is that you’re obstructing him from doing what he must do for this man. And so does this crowd.”
Bystanders now stood shouting at them. The men around the witch doctor began to advance on them, as if they were townspeople back in the States cornering a pair of boars.
He saw his father and mother answering the door to hear of his demise from a Society member. He saw his brother reading in the papers: “Missionaries Murdered and Mutilated by Siamese Mob.” He thought of the reverend and the schoolteachers, and the troubles that would visit them, were he and Winston to pass from this earth in this manner. Worst, he felt his limbs soften, numbed, as the men moved closer. The strangest memories arrived in those seconds: the smell of his mother’s roast; a view of the Hudson in autumn; poor Annabeth, so young.
He feared. There was no other adequate word.
Even if he were to succeed in bringing this man Bunsahk to the mission hospital, he would likely have brought back a dead man. The wine- and ash-colored bruises on the man’s torso suggested hemorrhaging within. He expected to see, at any moment, the man’s soul rise out and drift up toward the tall swing in search of the satchel that had eluded his bite.
His musings were interrupted by a nudge from Winston, who, lifting his vest slightly, revealed the curved wooden butt of a sidearm.
“I can fire one skyward and scare them off. If that doesn’t work, there’s five more in the chamber,” Winston said.
“No, there’s no need. We’ve done all that we can here.”
“Hold on, and listen. You just worry about getting him to a cart. They won’t make it past me.”
“Let them have the man.”
“What? Are we going to let him die so pitiably?” asked Winston with such passionate fury that Phineas half expected him to draw the gun and shoot the man dead.
Phineas said nothing but lowered his hands to his hips. Winston dropped his hands from his vest. The men reached Bunsahk and lifted him onto their shoulders. They walked off, the witch doctor leading them.
Phineas heard the boy shout after his father. He did not dare look in the boy’s direction.
After they returned to the mission, they made no mention of this incident to others. When the
reverend asked if he had enjoyed observing the festivities, Phineas told him that he had and thanked the reverend for suggesting he attend. They ate well that night. The cooks had, for once, made a fine meal of stewed chicken in the Dutch style, under Miss Lisle’s guidance.
Later, by the light of the full moon, he again crossed paths with Winston on the second-floor deck. Winston was leaning on the railing, his expression that of a man in a waking dream. When he did not show his usual smile, Phineas asked if he wanted to speak further about the day’s matter.
“It’s fine, Doctor. There’s no need,” Winston said, before retiring to his room.
Unable to sleep that night, Phineas wrote to his brother about the day, asking Andrew if he wouldn’t have chosen the same course. He described the incident in fine detail, desiring to provide Andrew with all the necessary facts to arrive at the same decision that he had made and portrayed the witch doctor in a manner that would help Andrew understand the frustration and fear that had overtaken him, surrounded by a crowd of angry heathens.
Will you see that I acted within the bounds of good reason? he asked in conclusion.
Then he added:
If you should find yourself in the city on business in the next month, please make inquiries with the Society about my transfer request posted on the fifth of November. It gives me great concern that my pleas have not been answered and that I’m left here, with troubled mind and spirit, to wonder if my ordeal shall last in perpetuity.
UPRISING
They always figured a way. The old gap had already been boarded up, but it was only a matter of finding another. The past few hours had yielded far too little, and their hunger grew as morning diminished the cover of night. Hushed barks kept the pack on the move. The short-haired one nuzzled and pawed the bottom edges of the wall, tracing eights with its long bushy tail. The mangiest of them trailed a few steps behind, followed by the cripple, who was the oldest of the pack and the only one who remembered a time when the city gave up steady riches. Before the arrival of impenetrable bins, piles left at the sides of roads kept them from starving. There were more of them then—allies, enemies, momentary lovers. The only ones left were those gifted with the swiftest legs and a nose still sharp enough to detect faint promises in the fumes.
A wood plank bent loose with a push of a muzzle. They entered one by one, scraping their fur against the edges of the widened opening. Inside, the scent of dry, pulverized earth overwhelmed them. They pointed their noses upward and sniffed harder. Days ago, they came across unspoiled stringy foods a two-legger had thrown out, and before that, an unsecured trash basket brimmed with salvation. They crossed quietly over small gravel fields, stopping here and there to smell milky puddles. They took care not to disturb the big metallic animals that they knew would soon wake to life as men climbed the dark skeleton above them and showered the ground with fiery stars. With each return of daylight, the skeleton rose taller. The sun shone behind it, peeking through.
Mounds of sand, damp from the night’s dew, swallowed their legs. The crippled one fell behind, letting out an unanswered yelp. The other two looked back, as if they had meant to wait, and then disappeared around the corner. The crippled one quickened its hop. Up ahead, where the skeleton rose from the ground, it came upon a smaller structure it recognized. The old dog remembered the welcoming light that spilled from the rectangular openings. From one of them, an older woman stepped out from a gate to leave a metal bowl filled with all that it could want. Inside, two furry faces watched unhappily as the stranger ate food that could have been theirs. That was a lifetime ago.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Incense smoke couldn’t hide smells steaming from the chicken Juk had left out for the ghosts. Waving a neon green construction vest with both hands, he shooed off the dogs just before they could get close to the food. He watched them retreat to the sand mounds and then edge back to where they thought safe and he thought disrespectful. He picked up a rusty bolt from the ground and threw it at them. Off they scrambled for a few meters before returning with another dog, a limping mutt he recognized from having seen it clipped by a truck the month before.
When he was younger, Juk might have admired their brazenness, but now it annoyed him that these dogs weren’t intimidated by him. If they could know how fearsome he had once been, with shoulders like an ox plow and arms that could lift two burlap sacks of rice over his back. When he was no older than fifteen, he had tried to swim across the Chao Phraya River—the pagodas of the temple on the other side merely shiny needles—giving up only after he woke gushing water from a bottomless dream, his mother in the gathered crowd, delirious from believing her oldest son dead. Then his bones had turned to cork from twenty thankless years of helping move the steel beams and cement bags that lifted Krungthep upward. His muscles pulsed with pain when he tried to sleep. And now these dogs, along with everyone else, conspired to take away what dignity he had left.
“Ai Gai, do you think this is funny?” he asked his nephew, who had done nothing to help but had the nerve to chuckle. “Now you’ll stand in front of the food until the ghosts are done eating.”
“Loong Juk, how am I supposed to know when they’re done?” Gai asked.
Juk checked the time on his watch. He guessed that twenty minutes should be enough for the ghosts to finish eating. Any less, and he feared they would give him nothing or, worse, come demanding much more that night.
“You think you’re so clever? I’ll tell you when.”
Juk could tell that Gai was barely awake. Not long before dawn, he’d heard the boy lie down on his mattress pad. He had thought of confronting the boy about having snuck out, but he didn’t want to be the bad uncle who replaced the cruel father. They would have fought, and it would break his heart to see the boy standing there, expecting blows to land. It was good enough that the boy returned from wherever he had gone and, at the least, that he knew better than to steal from his uncle’s cash tin.
“Loong Juk, will this be the week that the ghosts reward you? Don’t forget to share your lottery jackpot with us!” shouted the ironworkers heading up the ramp. They were about the same age as Gai but entirely different beasts. As his nephew washed off buckets on the ground level, they quick-stepped across narrow beams, guiding steel sections the length of train cars into place, the city a whole sky below.
“You cursed lizards! I will laugh when the ghosts come to wring your necks!”
The workers grabbed their throats as if strangled. They shouted, “Help us, Loong Juk! Help us!”
“Gai, are these the hell creatures you’re hanging with? Your mother would be so proud.”
“No, Uncle. I’ve never even spoken to them.”
Gai’s voice was louder than expected, and Juk turned to find his nephew beside him.
“Damn, Gai, why are you standing here?!”
Juk looked toward the ancient house, where under the crosshatched shade of the netting and scaffolding protecting it from the construction above, he had left the offerings on an entrance step. He saw two dogs locked together in a furious dance, each with jaws clenched on a leg of the chicken. Another, the limping one, had its face buried in the bowl of boiled eggs and rice. It was the only one to glance up and look at Juk eye to eye.
“Ai Gai!” he yelled. His nephew ran to the house as the dogs scampered away. Only aftermath lingered. From an upturned bowl, white beads of rice mingled with sand. A bottle of Thai whiskey lay on its side, the ground anointed.
Juk dropped to his knees in front of the house. How long had it been here? A hundred years? A thousand? Even under the netting, he could make out a roof covered with aged scallop-shaped tiles and, underneath, patterned masonry work of a type long made extinct by cement blocks. Through gaps between shuttered windows he thought he could see the faint contours of rooms with ornate, paneled walls—once grand for whoever lived here and now a luxurious home only for geckos and gho
sts.
He raised his clasped palms and pleaded loudly so that his voice would carry through all the layers of this realm and all heaven and hell, “Please, don’t come for us! Little us meant no disrespect!”
And then to Gai: “We’re fucked now, you hear?! Fucked!”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
From below, Tohn heard what sounded like screaming, but unable to make out the words, he let himself believe that the workers were just horsing around again. If something serious did happen, he’d find out well before his walkie-talkie lit up. Sound traveled easily up the floors. A man could carry on whole conversations with a friend ten stories above. He often listened for his name. In front of him, the workers smiled and bowed and returned questions with docile replies, but Tohn thought himself smarter than to believe them.
“Smell that. The freshest air in Krungthep,” he told Prateep, the construction manager.
Tohn thought he could smell the moist, dirtlike scent of rain, the same smell he remembered from hunting in the mountains with his father during storms, when they could creep closer before the wild birds flushed. There, leaves shook as falling raindrops answered the cries of tree frogs. Here, walls of water poured on the city and reduced its streets to streams of floating garbage.
Had Khun Prateep even heard him? He stood rubbing his fingers on the rivets of a steel beam. Sometimes Tohn thought he could smell saltiness from the sea, less than an hour’s drive away. A few years ago, at a different construction site, he was sure he smelled a trace of gunpowder after coup plotters attacked an army building.
“Will the the eleventh floor be done by the the fifteenth of next month?” asked Prateep.
“Most likely,” said Tohn. “But, Khun Prateep, delays can’t be predicted.”
“That’s unacceptable,” said Prateep.
Tohn hated the commanding way Prateep said it. It reminded him of the way rice buyers talked to his father after harvest was over. Prateep had joined the firm a decade after he had, but it was Prateep whom the company selected to send abroad to apprentice at a partner firm in Berlin.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 9