A Haunting Smile

by Christopher G. Moore

  Daeng waited until Snow’s face had stopped twitching. “Cortez say to me. I don’t know how to say. Daeng not understand.”

  She had his interest at an all-time high level. Snow lifted his head from her lap. He lay back on the bed, the lights off, listening to the gunfire, staring at the ceiling.

  “This ghost didn’t have a mole on his chin?” asked Snow.

  She shook her head. The room fell silent except for the gunfire outside in the streets. This time the M-16s sounded farther away; Snow guessed the shooting was coming from the direction of Sanam Luang.

  “What did he say that you didn’t understand?”

  “Cortez say to Daeng, auspicious time for human sacrifice. He say this many, many times. I still hear Cortez saying this, and I don’t like.” She touched Snow’s shoulder. “What does sacrifice mean? And what does human mean? Mai kow jai.” I don’t understand.

  Snow squeezed his eyes tight.

  “So why didn’t you ask Cortez to explain?”

  She cocked her head to the side. “I did.”

  “And?”

  “He say in Thai—phairee phinat.”

  “What the fuck is that in English?”

  “I don’t know how to say in English,” she replied.

  Snow blinked at her in the dark room. A ghost who spoke English and Thai. What the fuck, he thought. Howrey didn’t speak Thai. Snow who spoke fluent Thai didn’t have the vaguest idea of the meaning of phairee phinat. Maybe it was a designer drug you smoked or snorted, he thought.

  “It makes a good lead, Daeng,” he said after a long pause. “Next life Daeng born as a war correspondent. What about this as a lead? The carnage in Bangkok streets, like a human sacrifice, has left blood stains that will take years to wash away.”

  It was a reasonable start after a couple of years away from his trade. A much better lead, he found out long after that night, would have been the English translation of the military plan called Enemy’s Destruction—or phairee phinat. That night inside the Royal Hotel an HQ girl named Daeng and a room full of generals sitting across town seemed to be the only live people aware of the phrase. How did Daeng ever snag onto that piece of inside information outside of his hotel room? He hated being scooped by a rookie. And whatever happened to Daeng once she left his room two hours later? Would she ever return? He doubted it.

  PART 2

  THE TREASON OF IMAGES

  1

  FOUR OR FIVE of the village dogs slept fitfully, their paws curled up snout high, hind-legs kicking the dirt beneath a hut on bamboo stilts. From another hut a child’s cry echoed as if the child clung to the sides of the night and was afraid to let go. Tuttle thought of the Blues. Music which arose from poverty, pain and despair; a soundtrack of suffering. Tuttle marked the beat and waited as an old woman with a heavily lined face squatted on the wooden planks; she spread a bamboo mat under the mosquito net. Her fingers had aged into talon-like hooks; fingers shaped like cooked chicken feet. Her old, moist eyes watched as Tuttle crawled under the net. An old man, his face turned to the wall, snored under a net across the open room. Outside the hut, in the distance a motorcycle roared on an unlit dirt road. The headlamp light swept through the cracks in the bamboo slats like a prison beam across an empty yard and disappeared, returning the room to total darkness. After the old woman slipped away, Tuttle lay back under the mosquito netting. His eyes slowly adjusted to the pitch dark; through the cracks in the wall, he slowly picked out an umbrella of stars and the moon outside. In the fields beyond the village, the crickets and frogs were singing. A wind swept off the Nan River, rustling the fronds of the palm tree beside the well—the well pump had been paid for in cash by a bar girl who had gone to work in Bangkok. The headman had explained earlier in the evening the pride of the girl’s mother. She no longer was required to lower the bucket and slowly pull it hand over fist to the top. She had achieved a certain kind of status.

  As the old woman made his bed she showed Tuttle a photograph of her daughter. All the vital family documents were inside a canister with the words—“Hand Grenade MKII Cont. M41A1”—stencilled along the side. The canister contained the family birth certificates, household registration, and childhood photographs. These were the records of each family member’s life. Proof they had lived, gone to school and died. The birth certificates were on rough, crude paper with a blue Garuda stamped at the top. He stared for a long time at the photograph of the bar girl, who was about twelve years old at the time of the photo. Where had this past gone? She had left it a long time ago. He thought about the water pump she had bought for her family. As he lay under the netting, he slid closer to the wall and stared between the cracks. He could hear the river, and see the stars. He thought about that twelve-year-old girl who was now nineteen and tried to multiply the number of customers she must have serviced to have saved enough to buy her mother’s water pump. Machinery like a water pump was a luxury; for the rich, for those with girls who could raise the cost. Driving the water from the earth to the surface wasn’t a free trip. Raising water for drinking, bathing, and washing had a special measurement—a bump and grind math formula every bar girl had learned by heart.

  Tuttle thought about the old woman who had made his bed; her back bent like a longbow, this dignified woman with the scarecrow face and chicken-feet hands was about his own age. They had been born in the same year. Had drunk water year in and year out. Only the cost of the water had been different. In that here and now moment, he felt himself breathing. Another memory rose and fell. This time he saw his father’s face and remembered that his father was dead and he was the next generation to stand in that line. He and the old woman were now at the head of the queue, waiting, watching their breath, protected from the mosquitos and exposed to everything else.

  Tuttle considered what his life would have been if his father been born a villager on the Nan River. More likely than not, he would have squatted on the floor next to his father; his father would have finished his dinner of sticky rice and fish meal, tipped forward without a word, passing out from too much drink. Tuttle’s sisters would be working in Bangkok bars, and it would take days, if not weeks, to track them down; his mother would have been outside starting the electric pump on the well. His records and one photo would have been kept inside a canister marked “Hand Grenade MKII Cont. M41A1.” And when his father died, slumped over and stopped breathing, ancient belief and superstition would have kicked in—his lifeless body coiled up on the dirt floor, he would tell himself, was not dead, his body retained the soul like the canister retained the past. Lying on a mat, a floating stone’s throw from the river bank, Tuttle felt light years away from Bangkok. In the village, the soul of the deceased charted a path into a new canister, another set of papers and photos, finding a source of water and a means to pump it from the ground, a never-ending cycle of birth and death, until the distant point beyond time when enlightenment occurred.

  That night in the village beside the Nan River, the idea of enlightenment seemed as distant as the stars from a world where slaughter was going on in the heart of Bangkok—Sanam Luang. The foreign radio reports pounded home the message: massacres and death squads—no one is safe—shoot to kill. No one passes Go without a uniform or a Benz. These news flashes circled around the world, broadcasting eye-witness accounts of violence, of killings, executions, and murder.

  Tuttle was in bed when the headman’s second in command lifted the net, grinning and holding up a bottle. He invited Tuttle to drink with the headman and the boys; it was an offer he could not refuse. About half a dozen figures sat around, passing a bottle and lighting hand-rolled cigarettes. Tuttle sat next to the headman. He watched the old man drink half a glass of homemade booze—the kind that could make you go blind—and then belch, shake his head, shiver, and refill Tuttle’s glass with the clear liquid. The old man had a dirty little secret he had kept from the farang. He spoke to Tuttle as one would speak to a child who had not just suffered a bad education but had emerged with crippling
, deformed views of life and death.

  “When a man dies of a heart attack, what do you believe?” asked Tuttle.

  “Heart attack? No problem. The spirits not leave when the heart stops.”

  This was the view of a man who had laughed until tears streaked down his face because a farang had mistaken a kayak filled with bones for one filled with stones. But somehow the headman retained the emotional edge. He had proved that simple common sense always won. Well, almost always. Until the soul processed itself into the next life the spirit stayed inside the body like a floating stone stayed on the river. Denny Addison had divided the world between those who asked the question off camera and those who looked into the lens and gave answers. Not a story, but a narrative situation, wandering and sniffing from one territory to another, smelling its way along like a soi dog, stopping to lift its leg and make a claim.

  The old woman had so thoughtfully handled the contents from that canister as if the essence of her daughter were inside. How could that tender moment ever appear as an image on TV? It couldn’t. Her gnarled hands touching each item as if it were a sacred relic. These paper reminders of her daughter’s existence; it was the only evidence that this self had ever passed through her womb and into the village. The headman eyed him as if Tuttle had no understanding of the inner workings of life on the river. Why was this farang staring at the old woman?

  “Spirits? How many entities of the afterlife are we talking about?” asked Tuttle. The old woman sat alone in the corner, away from the men, clutching her hand-grenade canister.

  “There are three spirits,” said the headman matter of factly, as if any other number were crazy. Tuttle was thinking about the water pump the prostitute’s cash had purchased, and wondering if the old woman had sold her daughter into the sex trade.

  “Three what?” asked Tuttle, snapping his head around.

  “Spirits. One of the flesh. An invisible force. And one of the bones. You don’t die until each spirit leaves.”

  Somehow the old woman didn’t seem like the type who would sell her daughter for a water pump—but you never knew, he thought. A girl left the village. The spirits stayed in the body and departed in their own sweet time.

  “Bottom line,” Tuttle started to say. “When does the last spirit skip out of the hand-grenade canister?” asked Tuttle.

  The old man chuckled.

  “When the pin is pulled,” said the headman.

  “Of course,” said Tuttle. “And you throw it as far away as you can and hope none of it flies back as a ghost. Timing is everything.”

  This the old man didn’t readily agree to.

  Westerners, sensed the headman, were hard-wired with a defect—a sense of time urgency, time knowing, time worrying. Or as the headman thought, “Why the farang always in the big hurry?” Always how long does it take for the pot to boil, the fish to cook, the girl to fuck; look at the watch, take out a calendar and count the days and months and years. Where is this place called time? Show it to me. Give me a picture of where it dwells. The farang paced from wall to wall, thinking, how much longer do I pace? Where is my destination, and when will I get there, and how will I recognize it once I arrive? This strange farang with the boat filled with bones had confided that his father had died of a heart attack out of sight in a distant, strange, unknowable land. He examined the face of Robert Tuttle, thinking could such a man understand that spirits existed outside of time; that spirits don’t run according to time schedules like buses, trains, and planes. He lived in a village sandwiched between a muddy river and a jungle. He watched silver-bellied planes flying overhead. He had taken a train two times. But he was a rare exception. For his fellow villagers, outside life was remote, cut-off, and isolated—the surface of the moon was as close as Bangkok and the men who paid them for a vote.

  “We all blow up in the end,” said Tuttle. Ever take a calculator and compute the odds of making it off the planet alive? There were no odds, he thought. There was no chance.

  The old man shrugged his shoulders, smiling with a blackened rack of teeth in wet gums.

  “The woman’s daughter. Why did she go to Bangkok?” asked Tuttle.

  The headman’s eyes grew larger, the laugh lines around the eyes a twist of wrinkles and folds of skin, sallow from local brew and smoking. “She very beautiful,” said the headman. “Beautiful girl in Bangkok do very good.”

  “Money for water pumps,” said Tuttle.

  “For house, for many things.”

  The villagers smoking and drinking on the floor were not fools; they knew the score—the value of a beautiful village girl, the price of chickens, water buffalo, rice, boats, guns. They drank around a radio at night. The government radio station had jammed them full of lies about the shootings. When Tuttle had showed up, they hung tight, watching him on the river, and wash up on their shore. The government radio warned them about the forces of darkness—a “Third Hand”—and when a farang with a boat filled with bones of the dead claiming he had discovered a miracle arrived on their banks—could they be sure this was not the “Third Hand” on the run from Bangkok or on the run to Bangkok?

  So the headman thought again, how long does it take to find out what this farang really intends? Were the bones a trick? Were they an omen? Some of the villagers had been scared and didn’t want Tuttle spending the night in the village. Two of these villagers had rifles and had tried to rob a farang earlier on the river. He had escaped with magic like a devil of the water. The headman offered him a bed in his own house. He had been on a train a couple of times; he knew of the outside world, he suspected the “Third Hand” might be crazy talk. He knew the men who had tried to kill Tuttle. He wanted to study this devil of the river up close and took a chance that a man who had lost his father was not a sly, river spirit but a flesh and blood farang.

  A bone collector was asking about the timing of spirit release. He proved himself a potential Third Hand. If the headman killed Tuttle, no one would ever know. He smiled and watched the farang with bloodshot eyes and a three-day growth of beard.

  “You don’t say, now, Uncle Lek’s last spirit has found its way into the next world?” asked Tuttle. This was like asking what is the best part of the day; or thinking a day has any best part to ask about.

  He granted this much to the farang; he had escaped two of his best men who were ambush specialists—men who rarely missed. But this Robert Tuttle had vanished in the air, or so they said; only to reappear in their village.

  “Maybe many years,” replied the headman.

  “The corpse of the person doesn’t become dead for years?” asked Tuttle.

  “Not the same as saying it stays alive,” said the headman.

  Tuttle liked the old man.

  “The flesh rots from the skeleton. We wait. Flesh drips like the rain. What time of day does the flesh rain start? When does it end? How long does it take for a drop of flesh to hit the ground? I don’t know when. Maybe a Monday, or a Saturday. It all depends.”

  “Depends on what?” asked Tuttle.

  “If there is a wind blowing. Or a hot day. A door may slam hard somewhere. Something slips. A bird flies. How does it go? I don’t know how to say. But I once saw this fall,” said the headman, rolling up his sleeve and squeezing the upper muscle of his biceps. “Fall from my father’s arm. He was kept in the hut by the river. A water buffalo walked past and drank from the river. This fell off my father.” Again the headman tugged at his biceps. “Interesting, I think. Water buffalo comes and part of my father goes back into the soil.”

  Tuttle wondered if this was the booze talking. He looked at the old man and his cronies, two of whom had passed out and lay like scarecrows dumped in a back room. The upstairs had begun to stink of piss, fish paste, and Mekong whiskey. Only the headman and Tuttle remained sober; they had been talking while the others passed the bottle. The survivors of the hard drinking discussed the water buffalo which had gone to the river that day part of his father’s spirits had returned to the earth
.

  One of the men spoke. “Hammer a wooden stake through the asshole. Flesh go to the earth. Fast. Fast. Water buffalo too slow.” Then he passed out, hitting his head on the floor. He was the last of the river pirates. Lights out. They had showed up to drink with the man they had tried to kill—a guerrilla gig which hadn’t succeeded. The two remaining villagers laughed. Tuttle couldn’t figure if this was irony, malice or simply a joke about how water buffaloes and spirits inter-react on the Nan River. He showed no expression and this made the villagers laugh even more. This, after all, was the farang who arrived with more bones than any villager had squirreled away for the rainy day when a bone spirit was needed for one of those heart-to-heart conversations that only a bone spirit could understand. He had defeated the pirates once again. They slobbered on the floor. Tuttle, devil of the river, talking about spirits, bones, and whores was not someone you took your eye off, thought the headman. Why had he really come? What did he really want? Was he a Third-Hand character hatched from the river? Before the old man could think of a single answer, he passed out on the floor.

  Tuttle, left alone, finished his home brew and crawled back under his mosquito net. He lay on the mat, having visions of zombies rising in a B-grade horror movie, walking stiff-legged along the shore of the Nan River, coming into view as the kayak came around a bend, and there, above the horizon, dripping flesh droplets. Drip, drip. One drop at a time for months and years until the bones are clean of flesh, and the fat tissue, muscle, the lungs, heart, and miles of intestine have melted drop by drop into the earth, releasing the spirit of the flesh back to the earth. A treason of images.