Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  “Where were you last night?” the kid asked as they walked back down the street to the school where their car had been left.

  The American spat.

  “I wasn’t nowhere” he replied without looking round.

  The Dutchman looked puzzled.

  “You were somewhere” said the kid.

  The American didn’t break stride.

  “Well we was all somewhere”

  “But you weren’t in the room. I know because I woke up and you weren’t there”

  The Dutchman looked back to the American, knowing nothing of it.

  “I went for a walk. I couldn’t sleep”

  The kid looked down at the chipped and blooded skin on the American hands and the scratches across his neck.

  “Ok”

  When they reached the car the clean pillowcase wrapped around the Dutchman’s arm was again stained red and his arm was swelling.

  “We can’t keep going on like this, you’re going to die of blood loss” the kid said, swinging his pack into the back seat.

  The Dutchman had unthreaded a length of cord from the pocket of his rucksack and had one end in his teeth and was pulling the other side around the red rag.

  “I’m not gonna die of nothing out here” he said stubbornly.

  The American was sitting in the passenger seat of the car with the door open, watching.

  “Glue it”

  The kid looked at him.

  The Dutchman shook his head in resignation.

  “Yup” he said, “gonna have to I think”

  They got into the car with the Dutchman in the back holding his elbow high to stem the bleeding and they drove on to the main street and found a workshop where a man stood mending a bicycle. Long vines spotted with once-white and now dead flowers hung down over the doorway from the veranda above.

  The kid entered and returned a moment later with a small tube of rubber glue and a roll of green paper towels. They pulled the car off the street and poured water from a bottle over the wound and flushed out the blood. The crimson water poured down onto the dry earth and trickled away through the cracks in every direction. The American took off his vest and wrapped it around his hand and used it to scratch away the dried blood from the opening of the wound and the Dutchman winced and kicked hard against the car. They dried it with the paper towels and it took nearly the entire roll but finally they mopped up the blood and dried away the water.

  A young boy walked across the end of the sideroad with a dog and stopped briefly and watched them and the American glared and he went on his way at a quickened pace.

  The kid put both his palms flat onto the Dutchman’s arm, one either side of the gash and brought them together, closing the split skin and when he did more deep blood pulsed out from the wound and the American mopped it. While the kid held the wound together, the American squeezed a line of the rubber glue onto the protruding fold of skin on one side and carefully pressed it onto the other. The wound immediately stuck together and looked awful and swollen and black and a trickle of blood crept from the corner.

  “Well that’ll scar ya” the American said tossing the tube of glue down onto the floor.

  The Dutchman nodded slowly and said that it would and the kid said that it was better than nothing and they agreed.

  The American flicked the knife out from his multitool and stripped a piece of fabric away from the seat of the car and dusted it as clean as he could and held the fabric around the Dutchman’s arm and wrapped it tightly. The Dutchman tensed and blinked slowly and let out a breath through his teeth.

  “I feel like going back and kicking that guy’s ass all over the street” he said as the kid tied off the material with the cord.

  The American scoffed.

  “What?” the Dutchman asked, “you think I couldn’t?”

  The American grinned slightly but didn’t look up.

  “What?” the Dutchman asked again.

  The American just shook his head. He folded the multitool away and put it into his pocket and lit a cigarette.

  The kid watched him.

  The Dutchman held his arm to his chest.

  The American swung his legs into the car.

  “Come on, we gotta get outta here”

  The kid climbed into the passenger seat next to him and the Dutchman got into the back.

  “Is that where you were last night?” he asked him quietly so that the Dutchman could not hear.

  The American started the engine and put the car into gear and smoked the cigarette.

  They pulled out of the side road and onto the main street and the Toyota coughed in a cloud of fumes as it climbed through the gears and headed out to the west side of the town.

  They drove in silence past the little shops and cafes decked out in colourful wood and past the little shanty houses with their white walls and palisades and past the temple with its ornate pointed roof shining into the heavens and the little garden full of dead flowers and the line of motorscooters parked outside and past the big school gates and the little bus station and the roughly dressed farmers fighting in the road and the children hiding from the sun under the fruit stands and past the dog standing watching the two medics as they lifted a man with a wiry beard and black shirt into the back of an ambulance.

  Chapter Seven

  Kaleymyo to the Imphal Road and on to Dimapur

  On the outside of the town they stopped to refuel the car to make the final push to the border.

  They made the decision to head west and cross the border in the mountains at the checkpoint of Khenman instead of taking the highway to Moreh and risking getting caught without papers. There were laws prohibiting non-nationals from even driving some of the roads in that district and they were sure the authorities at the border would stop them and worse.

  At least in the mountains they thought, they would stand a better chance of making a run for it should it come to that.

  The road went uphill immediately after leaving the town and snaked up through the foothills and into the Arakan mountains beyond. The passed under Kennedy Peak and wound their way along the dusty white scar of a track and saw no other travellers at all until way past noon when they drove under Sezang, built up into the hillside in steps. They turned north through Tedim and stopped and bought water and supplies and found a doctor who sold them dressings for the Dutchman’s arm and who recoiled when he saw the wound, glued together and black and swollen and wrapped in part of a car seat.

  They bought tea from a stand outside the temple and sat on the roadside in the shade of a tree in front of the stall and drank. Two young ladies stood under a canopy on the far side of the road sat weaving and watched them and giggled and chattered to each other and when the airmen saw them they giggled more and turned away.

  The man at the stall behind them called to them.

  “Where you going?”

  They turned.

  “The border” the kid called to him.

  “You long way from home” he shouted, laughing.

  They all nodded.

  “How far to the border?”

  The man looked off up the road as though calculating it somehow by sight alone.

  “North?”

  The kid nodded.

  “Yeah to the north”

  “Hundred mile”

  The kid looked up the road to the north end of the town and squinted into the sun.

  “Is the road passable?”

  The man squinted and cocked his head slightly.

  He rephrased it.

  “Is the road good? Can we drive it?”

  The man shook his head and laughed.

  “No. Road is no good”

  “Can we make it there by dark?”

  The man laughed again and pointed to the car.

  “Not in that”

  They set out north higher into the Arakan and the track hairpinned up the mountainside through the trees and though the American hoped to take the stretch of road quickly it wa
sn’t at all possible. They broke over the ridge and hairpinned back down the other side to the river below. A herd of gaur stood in the shallows at the foot of the road with the hair on their back glowing red in the sun and watched silently as the Toyota came and went in a cloud of white dust and fumes and followed the track north along the edge of the river and into the jungle.

  “Don’t tip this thing into the water again, will you?” the Dutchman joked.

  The American gave him a playful glare in the mirror.

  “How’s your arm, featherweight?” he shot back.

  The kid smiled.

  The road turned away from the river into the trees and started its ascent of the mountain and they turned the car and watched the sun slowly dipping towards the horizon. The sky was still white and the heat had turned the metal of the car red hot and they had the air conditioning on full power. A thamin deer and its fawn stood in front of them in the road and as they neared the mother darted into the treeline and the youngling stood for a moment staring at the approaching car before following her.

  “Ha” the kid said, half to himself, “they’re critically endangered”

  The American didn’t look round.

  “We all are now buddy”

  At the top of the ridge the road straightened and dipped along the side of the hill. It was little more than a mud track and high ridges had been forged in it when the mud was wet and had dried solid again in the sun and they scraped along the underside of the chassis. The American twisted the Toyota around the holes and bumps and each man prayed that the old car would make it and that the wheels would not fall from the axles or the exhaust split open for they were a long way from anything at all and had no resources for spending the night in the hills.

  After some time a tiny village of wooden shacks with low sloping roofs rose from the trees, built up in steps into the hillside, each building set higher than the last.

  They slowed the car as they arrived and men and women and children came from the doorways into the street to greet them and they stopped the car dead in the middle of the track in a hissing of smoke and steam. The townsfolk gathered either side of the car and watched them with expressionless faces from all levels above and below and the three of them sat in the car like animals in a cage at a fair.

  The kid opened the door.

  “Hello” he said cheerily, aimed at no person in particular.

  A man stepped forward wearing a striped shirt and a longyi to his ankles. His withered and sunburned face smiled and though he was missing most of his teeth and bore a scar across his chin he was warm and offered his hand to shake.

  The kid stepped forward and shook it and the man held it and placed his hand on his shoulder and asked him where they were going.

  “The border. We’re going into India, to try to get home”

  The man nodded at this and contemplated it for a moment.

  “Where is home?”

  “I am from England and my friends here are from the Netherlands and the United States”

  The man looked over to the two airmen still sitting in the car. He waved one hand and they both nodded to him.

  “You take aeroplane” he asked.

  The kid shook his head.

  “No, there is no aeroplane now. We must go overland”

  He motioned it with a sweep of his palm.

  The man widened his eyes and chewed at his lip and looked into the car again.

  “Come” he said.

  “We can’t. Thank you, but we need to make the border by nightfall”

  The man looked at him and looked at the car and looked along the road to the north and then back at the kid

  “The border? By this night?”

  He pointed at the ground.

  “Yes”

  The man shook his head.

  “You don’t think we’ll make it?”

  The man shook his head again.

  “If you have food and water you can try”

  He turned and spoke to some of the other townsfolk who had gathered there and the kid motioned to the two airmen to follow him and the American opened the window.

  “We need to go man, this ain’t no time for making friends”

  “He said we won’t get to the border tonight. We should stay here”

  The airmen looked at each other and the Dutchman opened the back door and started to climb out and the American sat for a few moments with his hands on the wheel before joining them too.

  The man led them into a little building and a young lady in a long dress brought through a plate with cups and a pot of tea and placed it on the little table in front of them and nodded and went away again.

  “Drink” the man said to them, motioning to the tea with his hand.

  They poured the tea and sat on the floor. The children had gathered at the doorway and the man shouted to them and clapped them away and they scattered like birds.

  “Very hot” the man said, looking outside.

  They agreed.

  “Hottest in my life here” he said. He shook his head and for the first time the smile on his face dripped away.

  “You have lived here your whole life?” the Dutchman asked.

  The man thought.

  “No. As a boy I live in Tedim here in Chin hills. My father, his father, his father live in Chin. I leave to Mandalay to study and make family, now I am here again forty years”

  He asked about their homes and they told him and they told him about what they knew of the disaster that had befallen their planet and he said he knew only certain parts of it from what news was brought by traders passing through that place and he sat and shook his head at what they told him. He expressed deep sorrow to the American for what had become of his country and said he would pray for his family, and that he had always put his life into the hands of God but now God had proved to him that he could not be trusted with that power or that he was unable to wield it properly.

  They asked about the man’s life and he told them his history and the history of his father. He told them that they had been driving that day on the very road constructed during the war by his ancestors and that if their Toyota would make it the entire way over the border, which he doubted, they would have reached Imphal in Manipur. He told them how when he was a boy Japanese troops had taken the road and were moving south towards that very village and that he had watched his father help the Allied forces destroy sections of the road and bring down the bridges to halt the advancing Japanese. He pointed out of the open doorway and said that he would show them at the river in that village the ruins of the bridge which had been brought down by those very men and that he remembered it well even though at times he remembered little else.

  He took a drink of the tea and placed the cup down onto the plate and looked out of the little door.

  He said it was the men of the Chin hills and the men of Manipur and it was the tribesfolk and the natives and the brothers of his land who, in those weeks, stopped the Japanese conquest with their own hands. He said every person in the village was thankful to those men, his father included, for what they did for their country. He said that they were thankful to the Allied Forces but that the Allied Forces should also be thankful to them too.

  The kid and the airmen agreed and they finished their tea and the lady came again and gathered the teacups and smiled to them and left quickly with the tray.

  The man led them outside.

  “In my time here and my father and his father and his father too, we have not had this”

  He passed his outstretched arm across the landscape and they could see for many miles down across the hills and the jungle. The sun was low to the west.

  “Now we can live here no more. Too hot like this, too hot for animal, too hot for man. My family grow yam here and now there is no crop. Many years we have no food but we survive here always, now is no food and no way to grow food, so we survive here no more”

  He watched three men pulling an old scorched palm up the hill.<
br />
  “These people will die here, these children will die here. Eleven people dead here in eleven days. Nobody in Myanmar comes to help, not in Chin. We are” he thought for the word, “forgotten people. And we will die here”

  The man led them to one of the buildings and ushered them inside and asked the women in there to prepare the beds for them for the evening and to prepare them some food and they went about their work.

  They ate a dinner of rice and sesame and drank tea and declined to eat much at all for the people had nothing for themselves at best and they finished their bowls and thanked their hosts and sat outside on the dirt with the men of the village and shared out the last bottle of whiskey.

  They left early the following morning and the man wished them luck on their journey and they too wished him luck in everything that concerned him and thanked him and thanked the people of the village for their hospitality.

  He laughed and told them he would see them again soon for their Toyota would never make it to the border and they would be back on foot in some days’ time.

  By midmorning they were sure he would be correct.

  The road from Tonzang climbed higher into the hills and it wound from east to west to east and it turned back on itself and then back again over and over until they were completely unsure of their direction. The road, as it had been called, became no road at all but a track of thick mud and the rains that had fallen so heavily those past few days had gone and they could see where the water had flowed down the hillsides but these streams were already dried up completely in the heat. As the jungle grew denser, the trees overhung the track and the Toyota bobbled and bounced and whined and the fumes from the exhaust grew blacker.

  They all held on tightly to what they could.

  “This is no goddamned place to fail now” the American said to the car itself.

  They stopped on more than a few occasions for the kid and the Dutchman to guide the car around the holes in the road and to guide it along parts of the track so narrow they were unsure they could pass at all and where the road crumbled away at the edges and dropped into the trees below and they laughed loudly and cheered when they were past.