The next morning the villagers awakened with fuzzy heads, wishing they had never touched a village whiskey bottle. They found their farang guest at the edge of the village listening to the BBC World News on his shortwave radio. In Bangkok the Army had opened fire on thousands of demonstrators at Sanam Luang. The pro-democracy demonstrators had been fleeing when the soldiers opened up with M-16s. Volley after volley had dropped them; shot in the back, they collapsed in the street. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Parts of Bangkok were set aflame. When the BBC report ended, Tuttle found the headman standing in the doorway smiling.
“We show you how we send the bone spirit,” said the headman.
People have been killed in Bangkok, Tuttle wanted to say. But they already knew that people had died in the city.
Bangkok was located in another world with New York or London—and news of the deaths filtered through the post-hangover numbness; shit, some people got killed, blown away, as the villagers had a great party. Shit, the farang river devil was still alive. Tuttle was starting to spook them. Ever since he arrived in the village, the news from Bangkok had gone from bad to rotten. The old woman had been kneeling beside his net as Tuttle opened his eyes. She waied him, touched her head to the floor, as if she were making a prayer to him, this devil the villagers couldn’t kill. She was crying, her face a spongy, leaking mask of despair. Her chicken-feet hands clawed at her eyes as if she might tear them out.
“I worry about Daeng, my daughter. Maybe she die,” the old woman who was Tuttle’s age had wailed. “She come to me in my dream. She very cold, she say. She say she feel the curse. Daeng say she miss me but can’t come home now. That Daeng love her mother very much. More than the whole world, and she hopes that the electric pump helps her.” She had handed Tuttle the old photograph of the girl. “You look for her, okay? I pay you, okay?” She had six red hundred-baht notes crumpled up and pressed against Tuttle’s hand.
“I’ll look for her.”
“She works in Soi Cowboy.”
And did the old woman have any idea what was on Soi Cowboy? Or what Daeng was doing there? She was a bare-back riding machine for travelling cowpokes. The old woman had sold her baby down the river. Peddled her ass for the water pump and now had her weepy regrets that her investment might be in danger on the firing line.
Tuttle had refused her money.
“I can’t promise anything. She could be any place. But I’ll try.” The old woman didn’t want to hear this; but it was from the heart, so she had accepted the only chance she had. Tears burst out of her eyes, splashing on her blouse. Soon big, fat wet spots covered the old woman.
Now the headman reappeared with a couple of villagers and insisted that Tuttle follow him. The headman was not going to take no for an answer. Back in the village, Tuttle went into a hut and watched a villager gathering bones. Tufts of hair were still attached to the skull and some weathered leather hung loose like old stockings on the femur.
“You come and watch. You see something you not forget,” said the headman, his head throbbing from a massive hangover. One of the villagers with a long jaw and crooked teeth had gathered the bones and carried the remains in clay jars to an oven at the far end of the village for cremation. On the way to the oven, the old woman with the daughter named Daeng selling her ass in a Soi Cowboy bar ran up and grabbed his elbow. She said nothing but wouldn’t let go. He pulled her along. Somehow his presence was a comfort to her; he was someone who had been to Bangkok, and someone who was returning, a farang who would help her. The old woman made Tuttle think about Dee—the woman who had thrown the heavy piece of coral at his head. And missed. She lived near Sanam Luang; she would have heard the gunfire and would have been afraid. Dee would have cried, wishing Tuttle were with her.
Snow’s radio report had been blunt: soldiers had opened fire and shot people dead in the street. Snow had reported from a window in the Royal Hotel. A mass of people and—Asanee, Dee, Daeng might have been flesh dots in the center of this moving target of humanity fleeing the guns of May.
When Tuttle and the villagers reached the oven, the long-jawed man put the bones inside and struck a match. Soon he had a roaring fire going. The village men smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, squatted in the dirt, spat and drank liquor, belched, farted, laughed, drew pictures in the dirt with sticks. Later the long-jawed man and the headman gathered the shards of burnt bone and fashioned them into the shape of a person. The headman, his hands covered with ash, grinned, his broken, black stubbled mouth agape. This was bone art, bone drawing, bone finger-painting. The headman had decided that morning not to kill Tuttle. He wasn’t certain why; it was a feeling that killing this farang was bad luck. It would extend the curse the boy at the river bank had alluded to. Besides the old woman had delivered to the headman a five-hundred-baht note in return for his pledge not to kill the farang. So she hugged her farang; she would allow no harm to come to him. This farang had promised to find her daughter, a cash-cow, and there would be more purples if the farang found Daeng and returned her to the village. It was an offer the headman didn’t have the heart to turn down. He played the role of a spirit bone artist for this farang. His act of re-creation—the godlike reconstruction of the human form in bone ash—had the purpose of releasing the soul and the longjawed man had given him twenty baht to help in the ceremony. It was proving to be a profitable day.
Tuttle remembered that sonofabitch Harry Purcell and his crazy research on Cortez’s horror at watching the Aztecs and their rituals. Cortez was another devil, an intruder from the outside, with some heavy black Catholic magic working for him. The main Aztec temple was located in Temixtitan. Inside, the Aztec priests created effigies from seeds and vegetables—grand figures, Cortez had written in a dispatch to Charles V—which had been kneaded together with the glue of blood. Human sacrifices. Like an Army shooting its own people in the back. The Aztecs, like the Thais, like everyone else, used animal sacrifices to protect their idols and worship their soul gods high in the private towers above the city. The Aztec animal was a human being.
After the long-jawed man and the headman had finished with the reconstituted figure in cremated bones—Tuttle recognized a bone head, bone arms, legs, back, and feet—the ritual was over. He touched the bone man’s head. The two river pirates fled the scene, afraid that this river devil would touch their heads and send them straight to hell. Tuttle hadn’t drunk enough rough whiskey the night before; he was taking the whole thing seriously. So what did Robert Tuttle see as they stood back? A bone person which the headman told him still retained the spirit of the dead man. But the person was not yet dead, this little story spun by the old headman, buying some time as his mind flipped back and forth on the decision to kill Tuttle or to take the old witch’s money and let him go free. There was no contradiction for the headman. It was perfectly consistent: take the money and kill Tuttle. Why not, he thought? That was before Tuttle had knelt down and passed his finger over the bone man on the ground. There was no fucking way the headman was going to kill this farang now. It would curse the village to kill a man who had participated in the ritual. Finished with playing in the ashes, dirt, and charred bone, Robert Tuttle and his shortwave radio were Bangkok bound.
An hour later the other relatives of the dead man came along and joined the long-jawed man. The kin loaded a bamboo tray with a spade, a garden hoe, paper, and tobacco, and carried it to the side of the bone person. The tray was dropped and the things scattered on the ground with the tray bouncing, then rolling to a stop against Tuttle’s leg. The bone spirit had taken the objects with him on his final ascent. He had given Tuttle one final tug on the pant leg to say goodbye, joked the headman. He was in a good mood now. The indecision was a thing of the past. He peeled off a red and sent an assistant to buy some Mekong. Tuttle watched the ritual. The headman held up his hands and pronounced the dead man really, truly, absolutely, not fingers crossed behind the back, dead, wasted, gone, no longer on earth, in another place; his three spirits at last
had left and gone to the place where spirits dwelt. The headman, lost in thought, wondering about the possibility of squeezing some more money out of the old woman. He believed it was possible. She was loaded; everyone in the village knew she had money hidden. He worked up a scam. The old man took her aside and told her that Tuttle had guaranteed the old woman’s whore of a daughter would be returned. The curse would be broken. But he left it vague—he wouldn’t promise Daeng would come back alive. The old man had screwed this old widow countless times; as far as he could remember the whore’s father had died in Saudi. What he remembered was the exact place on the river bank Daeng’s father had cursed the ground and the village.
“You not forget?” asked the old woman, running like an old crow beside the river. She chased after Tuttle as he pushed off in his kayak. “You promise. You break. You die. You die.”
“I won’t forget,” he shouted back.
He watched her fade until the jungle swallowed her.
I won’t forget the bones, he thought.
Paddling his kayak on the river the old woman’s voice stayed in his ears. “You die. You die.”
Harry Purcell had written a passage in Cortez’s Temple, his latest contribution to the centuries-old Purcell chronicle, and as previous members of his family had done, he had allowed himself the liberty of expressing some personal opinions about bones and human sacrifice. Harry had been born into a family of gun-runners on his father’s side and Chinese bandits—generals, anyway—on his mother’s side; people who sold arms to the best of families, clans, and tribes, and those who sold guns and those who used them had joined their children in marriage. Both families had looked far into a future when East would be fused with the West. Harry was part of the raw fusion material—an alpha male who knew how to read when a hunting pack was ready to attack. In the killing business, no one knew more than Harry about the hunting games, wolf-pack hunger, the personalities of the leaders, the way hierarchies shifted and became unstable. The lesson of the family chronicle was that no matter how ugly things got they could always become uglier. Challenge the alpha male in any human pack and you heard the same words century after century—“You die. You die.” Those words over the centuries had been spoken, squealed, snarled, or whimpered, and when spoken by the right member of the pack, were taken as a call to arms, and a call to arms was a fresh order for weapons which the Purcells would fill. As Harry’s father used to say, “Everywhere around the world you find the scar of the alpha wolf ... seek and you will find it by holding up a mirror.”
2
CORTEZ’S TEMPLE
by
Harry Purcell
AFTER THE COLLAPSE of Saigon in April 1975 the American Government fought a POW “Bone War” with the Vietnamese Government. A major appointment with history was kept. The Vietnamese communists had not only defeated the Vietnamese capitalists and their allies; they stored away the bones of the dead American soldiers who the American Government had sacrificed to the gods of progress, democracy, and shopping centers. Vietnamese, mainly peasants, the forward troops who had scavenged bones from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, were born merchants. They sold bones to bone collectors representing Americans who, too, believed their soldiers were dead but not yet dead. The bone war became a proxy spiritual war. The terms of engagement were clear, as was the military objective—no peace until the return of the last femur. Until that day, the soldiers’ spirits remained alive, waiting, unable to escape until the bamboo tray with a TV guide, a Mickey Mouse watch, a Big Mac hamburger, and Elvis Presley tapes was dropped on the ground beside the bone man.
In 1519 the Spanish waged a spiritual “Bone War” with the Aztecs. The Spanish won that encounter.1 Cortez commanded 900 troops (and 150,000 local allies). His troops torched the forty-tower Aztec temple in Temixtitan, their seed and blood idols, and hundreds of thousands of human skulls the black-robed priests had collected.
The Spanish cremated the temple skulls; but there is little evidence they intended to release the spirits of the dead Aztecs. The Spanish Conquest had a high kill ratio: Cortez and his men murdered 240,000 inhabitants of Temixtitan. The Americans lost less than 60,000 in Vietnam. The Vietnamese lost hundreds of thousands; maybe millions—they spent far less time counting their dead.
The Spanish inflicted this high kill ratio without the attack helicopters.
**************
1 Family legend has it that the Purcell family supplied the arms for the Cortez expedition. The Purcells had promised helicopters and supplied a design. But the chopper was never built or delivered. The weapons and supplies which did reach Cortez cost him an average of less than one cent per kill. Cortez did very well from the deal. The Purcell family did extremely well from the deal. It put them in the arms business.
2 In 1519 Leonardo da Vinci died (assisted in death by the hand of a Purcell) at his Chateau at Cloux. At the time of his death, according to family legend, Lenny headed the Purcell R&D weapons development program. He had designed a helicopter, a parachute, an aeroplane, a basic steam-driven river gunboat. Lenny was years ahead of his time. But he had no heart for killing. He had an artist’s heart, and a Purcell plucked it from his chest.
3
IN 1978 TUTTLE had a walk-on part in a Hollywood movie shot in Bangkok. This was a memorable year in the City of Angels; The Deer Hunter was shot in Bangkok and went on to win four Oscars. Everyone thought it was Vietnam. Who knew the difference? In the film, there was a famous, unforgettable Russian-roulette scene with De Niro and Christopher Walken, sweating, eyes bloodshot, and wearing rags. They played the parts of American POWs held by the North Vietnamese like animals in tiger cages. The North Vietnamese soldiers let these human animals play with guns. This scene created for all time the myth of bitterness—that Americans had been left behind, betrayed to play Russian roulette in the presence of laughing monkey-brained victors. The Pentagon received a great deal of political heat after the Oscars and had no choice but to make the appropriate inquiries about tiger cages and POWs. The next year, Tuttle met Harry Purcell who had been hanging out in the city, getting laid as often as possible. Harry’s respectable cover was a university research project. The kind a funding committee selects because it promises to improve understanding of primitive cultures. Harry studied magic and the death rituals of the hilltribes; these people had lived for generations in the north of Thailand.
Harry disappeared for several weeks at a time on his upcountry fieldwork assignments. He was studying the hilltribe cult of bones and his Bangkok house was full of cardboard boxes of old human bones.
Harry was dressed in a rice farmer’s shirt with a peace symbol stitched over the heart and a pair of ragged shorts. He squatted Asian style. Beads of sweat dripped down his hairless chest; and his hair was matted, unwashed, and twirled into ringlets. He existed on a daily diet of rice and fish paste wherever he lived. Harry could move from the world of an English university to a mud hut river village without ever changing his tailoring or diet. In ’79, Tuttle took Harry for an eccentric Englishman who hadn’t realized that Empire had ended, the sun had set, and that the time was arriving to make a dash to a more promising land.
“Why do men have trouble talking about their relationships to one another?” asked Harry. “Now, if we were two women, I would already know how you feel about your mother, how old you were when a flasher first showed his equipment to you on the way home from school, whether you had cramps before your period, and your views on oral sex. Do you swallow or spit?”
“You’re something of an expert on women,” said Tuttle.
“A rank amateur exploring a temperamental tribe.”
The frogs on the edge of the pond in Harry’s garden began croaking. The overgrown grounds had a wild feeling, the appearance of being in the jungle.
“What drawer do you keep your underwear and socks in?” asked Tuttle. “Do you squeeze your toothpaste from the top or the bottom? Do you snore? Have you ever farted during a lecture?”
Harry
Purcell smiled. “No, you don’t quite have the hang of it. Women ask relationship questions. Men ask object questions. Like whether you enjoyed taking a woman from behind, missionary style, your views on blow-jobs, hand-jobs, masturbation and any fantasy stuff about whips, chains, animals, children, and the dead. When was the first time you masturbated? When was the last time? Do you worry about your cock size? What kind of porno turns you on? And so forth. But since we are men, what do we talk about?”
“How do you like to take your women, Harry? Sunny side up? Or do you flip her over and take her from behind?” A hardcore question if there ever was one.
Harry’s eyes lit up and he struck a match and passed it over a fat Havana cigar. He sucked on the cigar, his cheeks billowing in and out like a forge, coughed, covered his mouth with a hand, then handed the cigars and matches to Tuttle. His bony chest dripped with sweat beneath his unbuttoned shirt.
“I take women who like to be fucked from behind. On all fours. Do you think that’s peculiar?”
Tuttle shook his head, letting the smoke curl from his nose.
“Good, because it is the absolutely, one-hundred percent natural position for our species. Evolution sculpted our sexual organs for taking a woman from her ass end. When your cock becomes hard have you ever taken time to study the angle? That angle is the point at which our two tribes merge.”
Tuttle broke out laughing. “An anthropologist with a hardon theory.”
“Yes. But a serious theory. The why for the male cock curves pointing north.”
“Like an Aussie boom-boom boomerang.”
“A powerful, loaded weapon,” said Harry, leaning over and scribbling a note on a piece of paper. “A penis is a sexual boomerang. Or the original inventor of the boomerang studied the angle of his own erection; or that of her boyfriend. When you throw a boomerang right, it always comes back. And the female vagina, when you’ve got her on all fours, curves upward.”
A Haunting Smile Page 8