Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  He winked.

  The kid had indeed missed something for little of their plan to run the border there had been discussed aloud and it was in the subtleties of some previous conversation that the idea had been conceived. Maybe in the deep of the night in the deep of the countryside there had been some small mention of it that he had perhaps missed through sleeping though he didn’t remember sleeping at all.

  “But we’re not doing it?”

  He still wasn’t completely clear what was going on.

  “Border Patrol are already in there” the Dutchman said.

  The American turned to him.

  “It ain’t no more than a two foot high aluminium pipe running ‘cross that bridge there”

  He took the lighter from his pocket.

  “It ain’t gonna keep out no two tonne Jeep”

  He lit a cigarette and inhaled and held it in his lungs for a moment and blew it out through his nostrils and looked up into the rearview mirror to catch the kid’s eyes.

  “The Israeli assault rifles they’re sitting in there loading will though”

  They sat and waited as more and more vehicles arrived into the holding area behind them until the entry road itself was backed all the way up the ramp and onto the road above.

  boys walked amongst the vehicles selling their wa res from knapsacks though the kid did not know what they were selling as the first time they had approached the Jeep the Dutchman swatted them away like crows before they could stop and they didn’t return.

  Eight o’clock had come and gone.

  Nearly forty minutes later the kid was laying back watching an egret as it glided overhead slowly and majestically and swooped silently down toward the river.

  His attention was snapped back into focus by the movement all around him as those who had been sitting now stood and those who had been standing out of their vehicles rushed to return to them and around him engines fired into life and doors slammed and a grey cocktail of exhaust fumes filled the air.

  It was still some time before they had reached the front of the line and they sat with the nose of the Jeep just a short distance from the white metal gate.

  One of the six guards at the checkpoint put up his hand to them and indicated for them to stop. They surrounded the vehicle and peered inside.

  One appeared next to the driver’s door and muttered something to them in the local tongue though none knew what had been said.

  The American handed the soldier the three passports and he took them sharply from his hand and passed them to his colleague without taking his eyes from the men. He watched the driver and his Dutch passenger intently for a moment, glancing briefly to the back seat at the kid sitting with his pack on his lap.

  “Thhar?” he snapped.

  The American gently shrugged his shoulders.

  “Thhar, thhar” he barked again pointing to the American’s arm.

  He looked up at his colleagues who were inspecting the passports. One motioned something back to him.

  “Thhar ‘merikan” he drawled.

  He had spotted the Air Force Nightowl tattoo on the American’s shoulder. He pointed at them both as he spoke.

  “Thhar ‘merikan”

  He pointed again at his own Thai security badges and again at the driver.

  “He said you’re an American soldier” the kid called from the back seat.

  The American nodded slowly.

  “Yeah, I’m with the US Air Force, 497s. Stationed at Paya Lebar”

  It was unclear how much the official understood.

  Another guard stepped up next to him.

  “Out”

  He motioned with the barrel of his gun for them to step out of the vehicle. They did so and they were marched inside the security building at riflepoint to the cheap wooden desk where sat a short man in a white shirt with a heavily receding hairline. The three passports sat on the table in front of him and a small wall fan on the side wall did nothing to cool the sticky air. The place smelled of tobacco smoke and sweat.

  He watched them as they entered but he didn’t stand.

  “We should have just jumped it” the Dutchman muttered under his breath.

  The little man at the desk looked them up and down and spoke to them again in Thai.

  “Sorry fella, we don’t understand” said the American. He towered over everyone else in there.

  The man at the desk cared little if any for this and continued to speak as before. He stopped, again waiting for a response.

  “We don’t know what it is you’re saying” started the American, “I’m with the US Air Force in Paya Lebar, Singapore. My comrade here is with seventh Pacific, out of Osan Korea. He was visiting his granddaddy’s gravesite here before all this happened”

  The man watched them for some time.

  He looked between them and finally his gaze fell to the kid.

  He pointed to the kid while still looking at the two airmen.

  “Khea?” he asked.

  The kid shuffled on the spot.

  “Me?”

  “He’s with us, we’re giving him a ride over the border. Hopefully”

  He watched them a little more and beckoned over one of the guards. The guard skipped over to them in a manner contrasting his tough exterior and he stood in front of them with the TAR-21 assault rifle in his left hand angled slightly towards them, up under his arm.

  He stared at them.

  “Hk sib baht”

  They looked at him.

  Nobody spoke.

  The kid started to fumble in his pocket and the Dutchman and the American watched him from the corner of their eyes.

  “Hk sib baht” he snapped again this time with more urgency in his voice.

  The Dutchman and the American looked at each other and the guard stepped in front of the door and held up his rifle. The kid fumbled in his pocket and the American glared at him and neither man knew what to do and then the guard with the assault rifle stepped in front of them again and waved a finger across them both and held out his hand.

  The little man watched from the desk as their eyes widened.

  The guard spoke again to them in English

  “Sixty baht each to pass”

  On the Laos side of the border they rolled into Huay Xai as the sun poured over them like hot tar. It had been in the sky for a few hours and was already baking the dried earth at the roadside and as they parked the Jeep it halted in a puff of red dust.

  The main street of the little frontier town was already bustling with traders and travellers busily scuttling like ants set to task. They changed their Baht into Kip and stepped into a cafe built up from timber and covered in hangings painted with religious icons and birds and fish and flowers.

  Each of them ordered coffee and they asked for food but were declined with a single shake of the head by the petite waitress who came to their table.

  She offered no apology.

  They refilled their cups and drank them down and were back on the road in hardly any time at all.

  The road went north past roadside towns for mile on mile through conifers and palms and they passed one moment through dense and lush forestry brightly peppered with wild blossoms of every colour and the next through sparse dry patches of barren earth that looked to have not seen life for millennia. Fields of sugarcane and cotton were tended to by young and old in rice hats with woven straps all bent over in two and who could very well have been remained that way.

  The Dutchman had his mobile phone in his hand flicking away at the buttons.

  “Still nothing?” asked the American.

  “Nothing. Not since Bangkok. The battery’s about to die now anyway”

  He leaned across into the back seat and tossed the phone inside his open rucksack.

  “We’ll try and make contact from Luang Namtha”

  The highway passed through the centre of the Nam Ha National Park and through low scrublands filled with bamboo and the forest grew denser and the trees grew tall
er into the mist. The road tracked north west through the valley floor as the hills of deep green climbed either side of them and in the lowlands they saw herded gaur and pigs and wild horses and flocks of brightly coloured birds fluttered above them.

  The American pulled the car off the road where the Namngeen river crossed the road at Tha Se and they climbed down and drank the cool water from their hands. Young boys in shorts came down from the stilted bamboo dwellings and sat and watched them and came to them full of confidence and talked to them in their own language and, though the travellers could not understand what they said and they in turn could not understand the travellers, there were moments of affinity as the boys and the men splashed each other in the shallows.

  As they rose to leave the smallest of the boys reached into his cloth sack and handed the Dutchman a banana and the Dutchman took it and smiled and thanked the boy and he giggled and ran to catch up to his friends.

  It was early afternoon when they again pulled away from the highway at Done Moune following the roadsigns to Luang Namtha and as they slowed so too did the air current over the convertible roof and as it did the heat of the lunchtime sun began to fully reveal itself. They cruised into the south end of the town past the small timber homes hung with tarpaulins and lanterns and drying meats and each covered in red clay tiles. The road was well tarmacked but the ground around the town was rough and bare and trenches ran along the fronts of the homes and cooking fires burnt and motorbikes spitting diesel smoke rumbled along the roadway.

  In the centre of the town they parked the Jeep at the side of the road by a stall selling woven scarves and as they climbed out the old lady inside called to them and held up her products and the men politely declined.

  They found a small café along the road and they waved to the owner and took their seats on the low wooden chairs outside the building and the man came over to them and smiled and they ordered coffee and rice and eggs and he nodded and disappeared into the back.

  They ate and talked and the kid told them about himself and how he had come to be in that place and he told them about the elephants and about the places he had seen and when he was done the Dutchman and the American told their stories to him.

  The American said that he had been stationed in Singapore on a US Air Force training programme and had taken leave to meet the Dutchman who was an old friend from many years back and the two of them went to visit the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery where the body of the Dutchman’s grandfather was laid. He told the kid that his grandfather had been a prisoner of war to the Japanese and had worked on the railroad projects there until his death in 1942. He said that when they had gone to leave for their flight back from Bangkok to Amsterdam that it had been cancelled and neither the US nor Dutch air forces could spare the resources to help them.

  When they had finished the coffee and the food, they paid the man and thanked him and asked if there was somewhere they could find a telephone or the internet and the man said that the phone lines had been cut off only the previous day and that there was a small internet café along the road by the market but he doubted it would be operational either.

  They walked to the spot he had described and found the café and stepped inside but the terminals were off and when the American pushed some coins inside a telephone the man called to him from the back room saying that they didn’t work but he could sell them some tea if they wished.

  The American muttered under his breath as to why the man would bother opening the doors to the place if neither the computers or the telephones worked or why indeed he would want tea and they went again together into the street.

  As they walked back along the road towards the Jeep they passed an open shopfront lined with wooden handicrafts and beads and jewellery and ornate bottles of rice whiskey. Inside there were a huddle of people sitting around a television screen and the kid stepped inside to them.

  On the little screen he saw a devastated village on a hillside which had experienced an earthquake or a landslide and there were shots of crying mothers and emergency services putting out fires.

  The man stood and came over to the kid and nodded to him softly and he nodded back and the man asked how he could help and the kid asked if the man knew anything about travelling into China and the man said he did and had crossed the border many times to trade. He asked if the kid was a tourist and he said that he wasn’t but that he needed to get across the border to catch a flight home but none of them held the papers.

  The man shook his head.

  “We won’t get visas?” the kid asked.

  “You won’t get flights” the man replied.

  The kid asked why not and the man moved his hands around in the air in front of him and told him that there were no flights and he moved to the table at the back of the room and picked up a newspaper and brought it back and flicked through a few pages and handed it to the kid and, though it was written in Laotian, there was a photo on the page of a line of passenger planes at an airport somewhere.

  The kid looked at him.

  “No flights?”

  The man just looked back.

  “Anywhere?”

  The man shook his head slowly and took the newspaper.

  The kid thanked him and wished him well and went out into the street where the other two were waiting for him and he told them what he had heard.

  “What do you think?” the American asked his friend and the Dutchman shrugged.

  They stood in the heat for a few moments without speaking as each man thought of their options.

  Eventually the American spoke again.

  “Myanmar?”

  The Dutchman cocked his head slowly to the side and pursed his lips.

  “How do you even get in?” he asked, “you can’t drive in”

  “Can we drive around it?”

  “Around where?”

  “Around the top”

  The Dutchman looked at him.

  “You can” the kid replied, “up through China you can get round the tip and into India. You can pay your way into India”

  “How far is that?” the Dutchman asked and the kid shrugged and said he didn’t know but that it was a very long way though regardless of that they had no other option.

  The American shook his head and said the other option was to go across the Mekong into Myanmar and the kid said that was stupid and that there was no way of pulling it off and even if they got into the country they would have to drive thousands of miles to get out the other side and the American said that was not a stupid thing. He said the stupid thing was to go all the way north into China and up through the mountains into India and through the Himalayas and the kid said they would have to agree to disagree and if that was how they felt then they would part ways and the American agreed.

  The kid thanked the American and the Dutchman for helping him get this far and the Dutchman joked that they would see him on the other side in India and hopefully by then the air travel would have resumed and they could fly home.

  “Hundred bucks we beat ya ‘cross there” the American added.

  They all shook hands and the kid took his pack from the back of the Jeep and thanked them again and he set off along the road to find a bus heading north.

  He found the bus station along the road by a closed Lao Airlines office and went inside and bought a ticket to Xishuangbanna three hours across the border into China and he was told he would be stopped at the border and there would be a fee to pay as he wasn’t in possession of the correct paperwork.

  The bus was due to leave an hour or so later and he bought a small map and took his pack out onto the road and sat in the shade by himself.

  He looked at the map.

  There was no reference marker to show its scale or the distance between any two points but he knew the bus journey would take four to five hours and so he plotted with his fingers along the roads how long it may take him to head north through China into the mountains and he ended up counting it in days. The roads on the m
ap stopped entirely north of Dali and it was yet hundreds and hundreds of miles further to the border into Arunachal Pradesh in northeastern India.

  The thought worried him and he felt very alone in that place and he thought of his family and his girlfriend and as the realisation of how long it may take him to return home overcame him he broke out in a cold sweat and he felt a sickness in the very pit of his stomach.

  He put his fingers on the map again in case he had miscalculated though he hadn’t and he tried to imagine his challenge of getting through the Himalayas alone when the world around him was coming apart and he thought for a moment that he could die there.

  He didn’t know where to look.

  He couldn’t breathe properly and he stood to go inside to try to find a telephone to call someone though he didn’t know who and he knew the lines were down anyway. He turned on the spot like a prey animal unsure where to run. He was pouring sweat.

  He sat back down on the side of the road and stared into the heat and as he watched up the road the flickering white headlamps of a car filtered through the haze and approached and then slowed next to him and only when it stopped entirely did his attention focus enough to look up.

  The Dutchman hung out of the window.

  “Good luck friend, last one to India buys the beers”

  The American laughed and the kid stood sharply and knew entirely in that moment that getting into the back of that car was absolutely the only option he had.

  “I need to come with you” he said to them expressionless, desperation in his voice.

  The Dutchman looked across to the American who winked and nodded.

  “Told ya” he said.

  The Dutchman smiled.

  “Get in”

  They took the road south west back out of Luang Namtha into the jungle and it was not much of a road and had been laid if actually laid at all with loose gravel and wet mud and was as pocked with craters and holes as one might imagine the moon to be. The Jeep bounced ceaselessly and the kid was sure the wheels would eventually come away from the axles and send them skidding into the trees. The three passengers held on to any and every part of the chassis in an attempt to support themselves and stop the clattering of both their heads on the roof and their backsides on the underpadded seats.