Cambodia Noir

by Nick Seeley

  I put one foot in, and the boat bobs and shifts. My stomach does a backflip. Lon smiles and I crouch, gingerly, holding the seat for balance. He and Phann step on like it’s nothing.

  I’ve never liked crossing water.

  In the predawn quiet, the motor sounds like distant gunfire. The sky is the color of a bruise, the sea gray and greasy. I touch the water with my hand, expecting a chill, but it’s blood warm.

  Even in the shallows the Gulf is choppy. Once we’re out, Lon guns the engine and we’re flying, clanging and jolting over the low swells. I breathe deep, trying to keep my heart somewhere around my chest.

  Phann doesn’t look much happier than I do. He tries to light a smoke, but the wind tears his flame away. I’m clinging to the side and wondering how long this is going to take.

  It’s not light yet, but it’s coming. Behind us the town is retreating fast, already just a shadow. In the opposite direction: nothing. No sign of a destination, just gray sea blending into gray sky like a Sugimoto picture. It looks smooth and still out there—riding over it is anything but, and my knuckles are broken-china white on the boat’s edge.

  “Mr. Lon says there are no life vests in town.”

  I can’t swim, either.

  Too soon, the land is gone in the haze: we are very small and very alone. I picture the little craft pitching over, dropping us out into the warm, gray nothing. We’ll disappear—like we were never here at all.

  I think of June’s photographs. Some might have been taken in this very spot, but how could you tell?

  I could tell.

  Thinking about something other than the water helps get my breathing under control.

  I still can’t see the sun, but the sky has gone a shade of gray that suggests it’s there at last, behind the clouds. Take out my camera, set the ISO. June used a low-light film, to get that grain in daytime. Black-and-white mode, autofocus off. What do you do to photograph nothing?

  I point at the sky, at my shoe. At random. Snap snap.

  On the screen they’re just blurs, occasionally flecked with light or dark.

  * * *

  By the time we reach the island the sky’s gone cloudy blue, the water turquoise, the trees bitter green. I feel better. Photogs love black and white, but the world is more comfortable in color.

  Lon brings the boat to a crawl as we enter the mangroves, and I start to remember why I’m out here. The swamps are a maze. Trees spread their roots underwater and emerge in tangles of trunk and leaf. Between them, the surface is dotted with projecting stumps—the rest hidden below, ready to catch on hulls and motors. Someone who knew these channels could hide just about anything in here.

  I remember I’m supposed to be taking pictures. Look for anything that might anchor a shot: a quiet pool, a hidden cove. A few snaps, fiddling with the settings, trying to catch how the light slips between the leaves. I look for the fish and birds June described, but all I see are trees and more trees, their branches hanging down like curtains.

  Now it’s full light, I try Luke’s mobile again: same message.

  “The first village is close now,” Lon says to Phann, who dutifully translates for me. He’s good at this game. I guess you don’t survive as a KR soldier without learning to lie.

  We round a bend and see a sagging wooden pier projecting out into the water. Behind it the trees grow thick and tall, making a dark tunnel into the woods. I change my aperture and get the pier in frame. Not too close: the foreground is green and lush, framing the path like a stage set. There’s something. In an hour it’ll be too bright, but the sun’s still low enough to pull it off. I take some more shots as we pull up. Climb out of the boat, onto damp boards. Walk to the end and turn around for the reverse, using the pier now to frame the marshes: the road to wonderland. Not bad. I should come out here earlier, for dawn—

  Except I’m not really looking for art.

  I edge back, back, widening the view, gesturing to the others to stay behind me. A white bird that looks like a heron flies down, and I catch it standing in the water. It’s looking for prey, peering into the shallows with black eyes. Seeing nothing, it flies off. I stay still, watching the swamp move through the lens. I’m hanging on to the light, waiting for something: for the right play of sun or gust of wind. My knees start to ache. The moment passes, and I stand up.

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  * * *

  The village is good for a shooter, got to give it that. Tidy little Cambodian peasant houses on stilts—snap, snap. Women sweeping the dirt in wide, smooth circles, drying fish on racks of thin branches. Teenage girls in T-shirts with kromahs wrapped around their hips like skirts, bare feet the color of chocolate pressing gently into coffee soil. Snap.

  Most of the men are gone—fishing, maybe—but Lon chats up a couple of women, and shortly we’re confronted by a middle-aged fellow with a scratty mustache and hair pomaded like Travolta. Also wearing a kromah-skirt, but with a white button-down shirt and a suit jacket. He waves us up to one of the houses and crouches on the porch to talk. Phann gives his speech again, with Lon chiming in on the choruses. Pair of ravens, the two of them.

  I play my part: ask about tourism. What is there to see? Where can people go? The headman knows how to complain. The people are poor, the fish catches are shrinking. They need help from the government; the government should be taking care of them.

  I ask about the NGO. “Very good, very good,” he keeps saying, in English, then lapsing into Khmer for another funding request. Luke and his crew have made this guy feel important. He understands the need to save the wetlands—but people are poor, you see, and it’s hard for them to think about the future when they worry about putting rice on the table. He looks at me, like, What would you do?

  I ask about the poor: How do they get by? He says fishing and charcoal burning, like those are a living. I ask if he thinks any of them are involved in smuggling. No, no, there’s nothing like that here. He knows everything that goes on in his village.

  I nod. “Of course.”

  “You shouldn’t ask about these things.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”

  He nods. But his eyes aren’t the eyes of a man who’s insulted. They’re the eyes of a man who’s afraid.

  * * *

  I call Luke’s mobile again; this time it rings.

  “Hello?” Clear, American voice. I say some of who I am, and some of what I want. I tell him I’d like to look around the areas he’s assessing.

  “It’s a difficult time,” he says.

  “I won’t be trouble. I just, y’know, figured you could show me the best spots to take pictures, the stuff people would come to see.”

  “If you want to know about our recommendations, you should really talk to the main office.”

  “They sent me to you. Look, I’m out here now, in Chroy Chambun. Really, I’m just shooting around, I’d love a little advice.”

  He hesitates, then comes back sounding friendly again. “All right. Come to Koh Sraluav this afternoon. You got a guide, yeah? From town? He should know where it is. Ask around, the guys will know where to find me.”

  “Thanks.”

  The line goes dead.

  * * *

  I was hoping to poke around on my own, but no such luck. The headman insists on guiding us, and we spend an hour hiking from one sacred spring and secret lagoon to another. Snap snap snap: Playing at shooting keeps me from dying of boredom.

  I’m not going to ask about smuggling again. I don’t know what to ask, so I keep snapping and lathering on bug repellent. I’ve had dengue three times already; they say it gets worse every time. If that’s true, the next one kills me.

  Finally I say we have to move on; our guide looks relieved.

  I consider heading straight to Koh Sraluav, just in case Luke decides to vanish before afternoon. But if he really wanted to avoid me, it would be easy just to send me on a wild-goose chase. If I have to, I’ll stake out his office.

&nbs
p; It’s another nervous, jolting boat ride to the floating fishing town June wrote about. Its plank streets creak and shift as I step out of the boat. Below, the water is dark and ominous. Village kids run back and forth, shrieking and spraying each other with water pistols. No shade except a few lean-tos—don’t think I could even fit under them. Tiny women sit there, actually mending fucking fishing nets. Who knew?

  Keep the questions basic: What makes life hard for you? How are the catches? It draws less attention, but I’m learning nothing.

  I wander around for a bit, and the children follow me. The older girls are giggling—I guess I’m a sight. My shirt is soaked with sweat, and some grandmother offers to douse me with water. I turn her down: Who knows where that comes from? Some of them ooh and aah over my white skin. One hangs back, and I hear her talking to her friend: “He looks like he’s made of bones.”

  It’s getting time to head out, but I ask to use a bathroom first. They offer me the one in the headman’s house, which is a whole new mind fuck: a big room that looks like a beachfront bar, complete with neon beer signs and a pool table. I puzzle over that—how the hell did they get it out here?—then go into the toilet. A cupboard of clean planks painted sky blue, with a hole looking straight down into the water. I congratulate myself for not letting them get me wet.

  When I step out, she’s standing by the pool table: the one who said I looked like bones. She’s a teenager, very brown, with the perfect skin and huge eyes those poverty photogs love. The light from the door is hitting her face and I raise my camera. She steps back into the shadows, looking down, and I lower it.

  “Where from?” she says, in English.

  “America.”

  “You know girl, American?”

  I just stand there. For a moment I wonder if she’s propositioning me, hoping for a quick buck before I head out. Then I look at her downcast face and realize what she means.

  “Yes,” I say, in Khmer. She looks up, surprised. “I think she’s in trouble.”

  The girl nods. “She asked questions,” she says, in her own language. “Bad questions.”

  “About what?”

  “About the people in the boats. You be careful.”

  “What people in boats?”

  “The other Americans. The ones who come at night.”

  The room sways under me. Outside, something bangs shut. The girl casts a frightened glance over her shoulder—then she’s gone.

  * * *

  Koh Sraluav is up the coast from the main town, best accessed by boat. June called it the filthiest place she’d ever seen, and I guess she’d seen a few. The main street is lined with heaps of rotting garbage and smells like a slaughterhouse. The people are all ribs and eyeballs; they stare at us like we might be good to eat. Even Phann and Lon look put off. The Chams who live here are pretty much despised by other Cambodians, and I suppose this is both effect and cause.

  Phann hasn’t asked any questions, the whole place is too dire. But there’s no need: word has spread, and two men are sauntering up the road to meet us. One is a wizened, chain-smoking headman out of a Steve McCurry book; the other must be Luke. He smiles and waves, and a shiver runs through me.

  He’s Asian American, Chinese maybe, but tall, five-ten or eleven. Late twenties, early thirties, and handsome in a well-used sort of way, dressed in cargo pants and ventilated walking shoes and a loose white linen shirt.

  He’s all wrong.

  If he’d been out here ten years, I might believe the hard, creased face; the empty, faintly yellowing eyes. But he’s too young, and just arrived. This is not a guy who went to Yale or SOAS, who grew up in temperature-controlled rooms drinking eight glasses of water a day and learning to share his toys. This guy is from that other world. Even in the midday heat he has his sleeves rolled down—covering tattoos or track marks, or both? When he smiles at me and sticks out one carefully manicured hand, I can see where a couple of his teeth are a shade whiter than the others: fake, and recent.

  “Luke Ho, project manager.” Half-friendly, but he’s daring me to contradict him. Prison, then.

  “Will Keller. Thanks for seeing me on short notice.”

  “No problem, man. You know, we just have a lot of work to do here.”

  “With the assessment, yeah. How’s that coming?”

  That smile again: Do not fuck with me. “Yeah, man, so like I said, I can’t talk about any of the details of that stuff. You understand. It’s touchy, y’know—the wrong thing gets out, people get real upset. I’m sure you’ve heard.” He’s watching to see if I react. What have I heard? I just nod along. “So, anyway, if you want to know anything about the specific sites, the report, I gotta defer you to head office. I’m sorry, it’s just policy, y’know? But I’m happy to have my man here show you around—”

  He claps the headman on the back, and the fellow staggers like he might go down. After a moment he recovers and turns bloodshot eyes on me, chewing air with toothless gums. I’m not sure he could show me to the nearest hut.

  “It’s a beautiful place,” Luke says. Again, it sounds like a threat.

  “He reminds me of the men who used to hang around Father’s businesses. . . .”

  You knew right away, didn’t you, June? You saw Luke Ho at his office, and you clocked him for a dealer and a thug. But you played it cool, writing about his sexy smile and his Frodo hair, and made it your business to figure out what he was up to. . . .

  “No worries, man,” I say, slipping into a reflection of Luke’s too-friendly tone. “I’m not here to get in your way. I just saw those stories in the paper, thought, ‘Hey, this is a place people are gonna be into.’ Wanna get to know it, get the edge on the competition, y’know?”

  “Too true, man, too true. It’s great out here, more people should see it.” We’re grinning at each other so hard my cheeks ache. “Come up to the house, I’ll tell you what you’re gonna be looking at.”

  As he turns away, I make a tiny gesture to Phann, a finger across the lips. He nods.

  No, we’re not going to ask this guy any questions. Not today. We’re going to shut our mouths, take our pictures, avoid anything he tells us to avoid, and go back to our hotel. That’s the smart move, and from here on in I’m going to need to be smart.

  * * *

  In the boat, heading back down the coast. Can’t stop my hands from shaking.

  I’ve got a head full of crazy, wild elation, like I’ve dodged a bullet or jumped from a crashing car. Now they’ve seen me, they know my name: Now there’s nowhere safe.

  The sky is still bright, but getting overcast again. We’re flanking the island, heading home. Sea blue, streaked with purple.

  The great machine that haunted my fever dreams is starting to come together, gears clicking into place—

  “. . . they have boats in hidden coves and ride the waves after nightfall . . .”

  I have a guess what’s going on here—but it doesn’t tell me what happened to June. I don’t know what comes next.

  Up ahead, a spit of land juts out, silhouetted in the late-afternoon glare. It’s somehow familiar. I pick up the camera, track the frame over the horizon. Soften the focus and I see it: a flat, gray body of water, dark specks that might be trees visible in the distance. Just like I’ve seen it before, in fuzzy black-and-white.

  “Pull up to the shore,” I say to Phann. He stares at me, then translates.

  The boat nudges into the shallows, between thick stands of mangroves. Up ahead a patch of dark, silty earth rises toward the forest. Lon pushes up to it and waits.

  I lean over and test the water: not deep. Start taking my boots off. Phann mimics me, but I shake my head. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  The water is hot around my legs, the bottom sand and muck. Is this the place? I can’t tell, but there’s something—in my nostrils like lightning after rain. The earth tingles against my feet. For a second I think of land mines and my legs seize.

  Come on, Will. No one would lay mines in a swamp.
Come on . . . left, right. That’s it. The ground gets firm, and the sense of electricity in the air grows stronger. My fingers are tingling. Tiny insects whirl around me in stinging clouds. Up ahead, the trees close in. I look for a path: a shallow mud cliff, just a couple feet high, where the roots provide handholds. Pull myself up and stand a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom.

  A white spot in the dark: a cut branch. And another. A path has been cleared.

  That electric feeling is almost overwhelming as I walk ahead. It’s here, I think, it’s close, and my eyes fall on a tree that grows in a low arch over the forest floor. Beneath, the ground is covered with fallen leaves and bark, but no plants: turned.

  I get on my knees, brushing at the dirt with my fingers. It comes away loose, and then I’m digging, pulling up the soil in great handfuls. I don’t have to go far: only a couple inches down, they start to come clear.

  Bones, brown and muddy looking in the black earth. They’re so small. Smaller than a whole person anyway. You think you’d be able to look at a skeleton and see that it’s a man or a woman, but of course you can’t, it’s just bones.

  I wonder if I just found her.

  * * *

  Back at the boat. I wash the last of the dirt from my fingers and climb aboard. Lon hands me an old shirt to clean my feet, and I wave to him: Down the coast, go. He starts the engine.

  “What was it, boss?” Phann asks.

  “I had to take a piss.”

  He raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything.

  * * *

  Alone at last, in the hotel. I call Vy. She doesn’t answer. I call again. And again.

  Eventually she picks up. “What exactly do you want?” Enunciating every word. She sounds French, so she’s pissed.

  “I’m out west, and I need your help.”

  “Forget it, Will, I’m not playing any of your games—”