A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  And he watched the red sky shooting flames from another flare which flown thirty meters away on tiny parachutes. He was punchy from lack of sleep, feeling the kayak rocking, that cradle-like rock which made grown men turn green. A wimp, a nerd, a geek kind of guy whose face flashed neon gray before sloughing off into a greenish terror. He never figured himself for that kind of guy. But he had vomited in the bottom of his kayak and over the legs which had no feeling. Too little sleep, the flares, his near miss with eternity, his role in a killing, the image of the bands of katoeys setting up johns on Patpong. Who wouldn’t barf up their guts and then some?

  He wiped his mouth. His throat had gone dry and scratchy. He remembered the fear of being under fire from his days covering the Vietnam war. The first lesson of the battlefield was a simple one—any man who had another man killed instantly felt the addiction of slaughter; the feeling of supreme power to kill another person. But no one could have predicted until that moment whether he liked that feeling. Or if he felt at all. He was not in this league, he thought. When he shivered, his teeth bucked like a rodeo horse inside his mouth. The lines of the katoey in Addison’s film flooded back into his mind:

  “When you have power then people fear you. I want people to fear me. When you make fear you can have anything you want. No one can say no to you.”

  When he woke the darkness had returned to the sky; a flat, seamless blackness. It was the river which was on fire. A ring of fire bouncing on the water’s surface. The river pirates had returned with kerosene. No more than twenty meters from his kayak a wall of flames burnt. He heard the pirates’ voices far off, the firing of their M-16s in the reeds, then near, and then they had gone again, laughing and joking. As if the flames had allowed them to recover some lost dignity. He froze, sitting motionless as the heat of a fire made him sweat. Tuttle sat startled, his face wet, thinking about the dead man in Bangkok as he paddled. He clapped his hands. An hour passed as he sat under his poncho, slipping in and out of sleep, the smell of fire in his nostrils. He almost tipped the kayak over. Half-crouching, he pulled back his poncho, clapping and shaking his hands as a light streak, a razor-thin, crooked smile ran like a fault line along the horizon then vanished in fog.

  “Fuck you and your documentary situations, Denny Addison,” he screamed, and then collapsed, hitting his head on the kayak. He lay sprawled out, blood spilling from a gash in his head. He listened to the water against the kayak, feeling himself breathing and feeling numb. He inched forward, dipping his hands into the river and splashing his face. He saw his blood.

  “I’m here,” he shouted, the water and blood dripping from his chin.

  He wished the pirates would return. Let them do what they had set out to do. Select the situation. Finish it. But the river pirates had gone and there was no reply to his anguished cry.

  As hard as Tuttle tried as the first dawn cracked the water surface with light, he could find no color on his hands. He knew what he felt. He shoved his arms up to the elbow in the river. He held them under water, clutching his hands into fists, releasing them. Would they ever feel clean again? This time as he pulled his dripping arms from the Nan, his red-rimmed eyes saw flesh but felt the presence of fresh blood.

  With wet fingers wrapped around the wooden paddle, he squeezed down hard, shutting off his own blood, then he pulled the tip of the paddle through the shimmering water. He felt a chill start at his shoulders and run down his back until the shiver bunched him up, doubling him over on his kayak. He hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours. He had prize-fighter eyes, slits which blinked as if the next punch was on its way. He wanted to be home. The Nan River had claimed him, rocking and spraying him. For several days he had been alone on the river, his paddle dipping below the surface. He had disappeared from Bangkok. Alone on the river he glided, moving at his own speed and under his own power. His journey was disrupted by the pirate attack, the fire on the water, his cracked skull. He laid his paddle across the kayak and waited. He saw—or thought he saw—an object, a stone, and then another, floating in his wake. An hallucination, he thought. His eyes no longer completely shut or opened; he had reptile-like lidless eyes. He leaned forward in his boat. “What is this?” he thought. And then, “Why is this happening to me?” The two questions every journey throws up without any possibility of answer.

  Objects moved over the surface of the water towards him; studded round, smooth objects bobbing on the surface of the river. He thought the fire had unleashed debris. A fine morning mist filtered the light on the river, turning water and sky into a sheen of crystal overhanging the horizon. He had the feeling of vertigo; someone who had lost his direction, and had been set adrift along an axis without any reference to north or south, or up and down.

  He glanced at the shoreline where the shadows of thick palm trees and reeds were swallowed in shadows and mist. He paddled again, this time slowly, looking for shelter, watching and listening, as if searching for an edge. The tip of the paddle struck one of the floating objects. His first reaction was disbelief: stones don’t float. He discounted what his eyes reported as floating. He told himself the stones were an illusion created from water, mist, and light on a mind numbed after hours of paddling. He thought back to the day before in a dreamy replay: picking up in his binnoculars again the two Thais in singlets and shorts who had rifles—M-16s—and ammo belts hooked over the shoulder. They’d gave chase in an old boat with a small outboard engine leaving a trail of dirty blue smoke, closing in from about two hundred meters behind his kayak. He remembered how the sudden terror had charged him as he paddled, the crack of the rounds, the awful splash of water ten meters behind and to his left. What an irony, he had thought. He had fled from Dee’s apartment to the river. Travel allowed him to shed one identity in order to find another. Being fired upon was the best reason why people rarely abandoned their comforts. Asanee had been right about that much—even though most of what she had said had sounded like something learned from Addison—Tuttle had fallen into a routine life.

  As he followed a bend in the river, he had enough of a lead to duck out of sight and lose the pirates. His refuge was near a bank covered with a long bed of heavy reeds as high as elephant grass. They could have searched for days in those weeds and never have found him. The pirates had raised their rifles and pointed flashlights along the shore. Twice, three times they fired randomly into the shadows. This was gunfire born of frustration and anger. They cursed him in Thai. After an exhausting hour or so of cutting through the weeds the pirates left.

  The morning after pirates had tried to kill him, Tuttle’s kayakdrifted in thick weeds. He blinked hard, realizing he had survived; he awoke as if he had been dreaming of death and stones which floated. He bent down and fumbled among the stones, found one and lobbed it like a baseball. It struck the surface of the water and disappeared for a second before it returned. It floated. He stared at it as if he could through force of will compel the stones to sink to the bottom of the river. “Floating stones,” he cried out. This was insane. But as he looked around his kayak, he saw more floating stones bobbing along the surface. It was as if he had entered another universe where the ordinary rules of physics had been altered. For several kilometers, he touched the floating stones with the tip of his paddle. Finally, he leaned over the side of the kayak and plucked another one of the stones from the warm water. After several hours, he had determined to fill the bottom of his kayak with stones. He turned one of the objects over in his hand, dropped it on the pile, examined another and for the rest of the day he continued to marvel at this inexplicable act of nature. He thought how he would explain this phenomenon to his friends and colleagues in Bangkok. At first, they would laugh at him. But he had the proof, he thought, looking down at the oyster-shell-like objects.

  Floating stones. He had been dreaming, but this wasn’t a dream. Or was it? Was he really dead and this was another place? He pinched his hand and felt the pain. He had recovered enough samples to give to many people. In his mind, Tuttle compiled
a list of places to which he would send a sample—international institutes, research labs, famous universities, and later, he dreamed about the TV coverage, seminars, panel discussions and scientific papers which would follow. So much for Addison and his documentary film about katoeys; he had an image that had never been seen before anywhere. He would be at the center of the controversy as the discoverer of stones which floated on water. As he handled the floating stones, Tuttle thought of Harry Purcell, whose gun- running family had supplied the Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortez, Purcell and his tale of how Montezuma had been dispatched with a stone hitting his head. In 1519, Cortez wrote in a dispatch to the King and Pope that three days and nights passed before Montezuma died. What would Purcell make of this kind of stone? Suddenly he wished Harry Purcell, who had suggested the trip on the Nan River, had joined him on the journey.

  Tuttle navigated his kayak toward signs of a village along the bank of the river. A column of smoke rose from behind a thick wall of palms. The villagers were burning one of their dead. A young boy in shorts watched him from the bank, then ran away to the village and spread the alarm.

  “Farang, farang, farang,” the boy cried.

  “Khon Thai, khon Thai, khon Thai,” shouted Tuttle in return.

  The boy looked stunned. It was one thing to call a farang a farang but a farang calling a Thai a Thai was something never imagined possible. The farang must have understood his words. His face went red and he raced away, tucking, twisting, and finally disappearing in the foliage.

  He reappeared ten minutes later in the company of the headman and several curious village elders. The boy pointed at him. This was the chance for a trial run, Tuttle thought. The people who lived along the Nan River would be the first to witness his “floating stone” presentation. He had rehearsed what he would say before the cameras for one day and night. Only there was no one with a camera along this stretch of the river. After dinner, as they sat around a fire which burnt in one corner of the headman’s bamboo hut, Tuttle pulled a stone from his pocket. He held it out as a gift. A show of gratitude to his host who had offered him food, shelter, and conversation. Why should he reserve the floating stones only for the multi-degreed people in black robes? Tuttle asked for a bowl of water which the headman’s daughter duly brought. She set it in front of Tuttle. He waited until all eyes inside the hut had focused upon him. Only then did he delicately lower the stone into the bowl. He held his breath but it didn’t sink; just like the stones on the river this stone floated in the bowl.

  The villagers did not gasp in disbelief, register any panic, as their eyes focused on the stone. In such a remote village, Tuttle doubted that even the elders had ever seen more than a handful of white faces. The villagers examined his gift, then looked up at Tuttle without betraying any hint of surprise or fear. Tuttle turned the stone over. Still this caused no reaction. They didn’t seem to get the significance of what he was trying to show them. Several more moments passed.

  He decided upon another demonstration. Turning back to the bowl, he dropped one of the objects into the water.

  “It floats,” he said. “The stone I dropped into the bowl did not sink. You understand? The stone is floating like a boat.”

  They stared at the bowl and then at Tuttle, talking among themselves.

  “You can touch it. It won’t hurt you,” he said, passing several of his finds to the villagers.

  The villagers now looked at one another, passing the floating stones along the line, when the first laugh began as a lone rifle shot. Soon the room erupted like a firing range in an uproar of wild, uncontrolled laughter. The headman’s mouth spread open into a nervous smile as he leaned over and poked the object with his finger. The headman was the host; this was his hut, and he, above all, owed Tuttle as the guest a degree of respect; but cultural duty was insufficient to suppress the laughter which shook the headman’s body and turned his face red. The blue tattooed tiger on the headman’s chest appeared to be running as the headman’s chest rolled with waves of laughter. Everyone in the hut doubled over in laughter, their faces blood red. Tuttle watched as all around him dissolved into breathless laughter. He stood grimly clutching his floating stones. Each time villagers saw Tuttle’s perplexed, solemn expression they again relapsed into laughter until not one of them was able to catch his breath and tears streamed down his cheeks. Tuttle avoided their faces, and stared at his feet; he didn’t know what to say. He waited until the headman caught his breath and then asked him a question.

  “Why does the floating stone cause so much laughter?” asked Tuttle.

  The headman wiped the tears from his eyes.

  “Because you call them floating stones,” said the headman, a hiccup of a laugh belched up from his belly.

  Robert Tuttle thought he had done a bad job of translation.

  “How would you call them?” asked Tuttle.

  The headman stared at a floating stone in the bowl and picked it up with his fingers. He held it and continued to stare at Tuttle.

  “Not stones,” said the headman.

  Tuttle took the object from the headman’s fingers.

  “Then what are they?”

  “Cremated bones. Someone die. The family have the bones burnt. They throw the bones in the river. Finished.”

  The story the headman told him was a relatively straightforward one. After a cremation in a village the remains of the deceased were tossed into the river. The answer as to what lay in the bottom of Tuttle’s kayak was not what he had expected. He had collected the scattered bones of the dead. For miles he had fished out the floating stones, thinking how he would challenge man’s conceit that gravity, nature, and existence could be fully understood. Robert Tuttle smiled at the mess of bones. He had been suckered in like a Patpong tourist on a katoey’s tranquilizer-laced nipple. He understood that he had not seen or understood anything. The world flipped over from levels of understanding to levels of ignorance.

  So much had changed in a week. He was on the river paddling a kayak. Pirates had come within a few meters of killing him. Then he sat in a bamboo hut, smiling, showing his teeth, and passing to a headman his discovery of floating stones. As the headman flashed a blue-gummed smile, Tuttle tuned in his shortwave radio to the BBC World News. An English voice read the news. He caught the word—Bangkok. The military had moved against demonstrators. Bangkok was in chaos. He listened, not moving, not breathing, as the news described the death toll among the civilians. He worried about Asanee, his daughter; she would have been at the huge open grounds near the Grand Palace which bore the name of Sanam Luang—here was the flashpoint where troops, according to the BBC, in full battle dress, had opened fire. First the troops had fired into the sky, shooting at the stars, and then suddenly they lowered their weapons and took aim at the crowd. All he had to clasp onto—these objects of potential fame—had turned out to be human remains. And as the laughter from the headman and his cronies died down, Tuttle realized that all he had were these floating stones in a sea of death rising around him on every side.

  5

  TUTTLE HAD FOLLOWED a watery trail of death. The bones had followed him on the Nan River. He stood beside his beached kayak and stared at the bottom at the large catch which had been destined to change his life. Tuttle laughed. What if the river pirates had captured a farang who was a bone stealer? Would they have fled in fear or killed him as they had planned? Had the pirates planned as carefully as he had, then he would be dead, he thought, as one by one he tossed the bones into the river, and watched them bobbing in the eddies.

  The bone fragments had been transformed in fire into objects that appeared to be pitted gray stones with white sparkling pinpoints of light. The smooth shards were unlike anything he had imagined as the skeletal form upon which human beings were hung or as the final remains left after the flesh had departed. His kayak contained the residue of life; once the bones had been attached to flesh, blood, organs, and had experienced pain, pleasure, regret, and had recalled, joked, hated, love
d, wept and fucked. What survived of that experience, then, if all these narrative elements had become detached from life? Such experiences, like heirlooms, passed into living people’s imagination and memory.

  Harry Purcell—a hardcore HQ cowboy of a time before bareback riding became a game of Russian roulette—believed the HQ species of male was hot-wired for danger and high-risk bucking horses. They sat around the table listening to the jukebox and exchanged cigarettes, ideas, beer, theories, whores and concepts such as whether the short-time Hotel Playgirl on Soi 11 had better towel service and mirrors than the Happy Day which was hidden away on a lane off Soi 31.

  Tuttle threw the cremated bones into the river and felt a shudder of horror—he thought of that instant each time he walked into his daughter’s apartment and saw the naked picture Denny Addison hung on the wall. One of the flat bones skipped over the water three times, leaving little ripples. A few feet behind him some villagers squatted in the dirt watching him skip bones across the river. He felt their presence. He lobbed another smooth bone into the river and watched the ripple spread out. Tuttle told himself sooner or later he would find the strike zone. Only a few more bones were left in the boat. One of the villagers slid down to the bank and watched this World Series close-up. One villager handed Tuttle a half-empty bottle of pure white home-brewed whiskey. Tuttle took a drink, wiped his mouth. The liquor burnt all the way down his throat. He thanked the villager, he pretended to shake off two, three signals from the invisible catcher, then wound up and drilled his last bone.