by Gill Lewis
I opened the cage and tried to pull Sôok-dìi straight, but he was almost too heavy now. His mouth was dry and sticky. I poured a little water from a cup, and he pushed his tongue forward and licked his mouth. It would be a while before he woke up fully. I gently ran my hands across his belly, across the soft skin shaved of fur.
I felt sick.
The Doctor must have had problems. Maybe he was nervous being watched by Dr. Ho. I counted twenty red needle marks across Sôok-dìi’s belly where the Doctor had tried to find the gall bladder. A clear yellow liquid trickled from one of the wounds. The skin on his belly was hot and tight, like a drum. Sôok-dìi groaned when I gently pressed it.
“Hello, Tam.”
I looked up to see Savanh standing next to me. She didn’t look so well today. The filtered light through her pink umbrella cast a greenish shadow on her face.
I put my arm across Sôok-dìi, as if I were protecting him from her somehow.
She smiled. “Can I touch him?”
I frowned. I didn’t want her touching him. She was the one causing him this pain.
She looked at me. “I hate this as much as you, Tam, but my father says that bear farming in the city stops people catching wild bears,” she said. “He says it helps conserve the wild bears.”
I snorted, and I glanced across at the new cages waiting for more bears.
“My doctors tell my father that I am getting better. They tell him this bear will cure me.”
I ran my fingers along the cracked skin of Sôok-dìi’s paws. “People tell your father the things he wants to hear.”
Savanh twirled the handle of her umbrella, twisting the top in a blur of pink and gold. She frowned, her eyes glazed with tears. “Why would they do that?”
I looked at her. “Because they are scared.”
Savanh raised her eyebrows and gave a small laugh. “Scared? Of my father?”
I ran my fingers through the coarse hair on Sôok-dìi’s back. “Your father is a big man. People tell your father the things he wants to hear. They tell him that electricity has come to our village, that we have schools, that we have doctors. They tell him we are grateful to have been moved from the mountains. People are too scared to tell it how it is. They are too scared to tell the truth.”
I couldn’t hide the bitterness from my voice. I thought of our broken village, not just broken from the mountains but people broken from one another. I thought of Noy and our broken friendship. I thought of the bears, too, taken from their forests.
Savanh didn’t say anything. She just stared at me, spinning the umbrella around and around in her hand. I couldn’t tell if she was mad at me or not, but I didn’t care.
“Sôok-dìi is sick,” I said. “He will die.”
Savanh stepped forward and put her hand on my arm. “Sôok-dìi is a fighter,” she said. “I will see that my father makes sure he gets the best treatment.”
I pulled my arm away. “You’re the one making Sôok-dìi sick. Don’t you get that?”
Savanh tried to pull me around. “Tam . . . I wish . . .”
I spun around to face her. “I wish you were dead.”
I felt Savanh’s eyes on me for some time. Then she turned and walked away, her soft shoes padding on the concrete.
I trickled more water in Sôok-dìi’s mouth. He was waking up slowly. His eyes twitched open and he blinked, watching me. I wished I’d said nothing to Savanh. It was a hurtful thing to say. I should have just let her stroke Sôok-dìi and go.
I slipped the almond biscuit from my pocket and crumbled it in my fingers, pushing the pieces in front of Sôok-dìi’s nose. He snuffled them and reached out his tongue.
“I see you, Tam.”
I spun around.
Savanh had returned and was watching me.
I hid the biscuit, shut the cage door, and stared down at the floor.
Savanh walked up to me. “I see you.”
“It’s only a small biscuit,” I said.
Savanh leaned against the golden bars. “I’m not talking about the biscuit, Tam!”
I looked at her.
Savanh sighed. “When I was little, I was a horrible child. Father used to bring home toys and dolls from his travels. Some of the dolls were so beautiful, dressed in silk. But I’d break them and throw them away. Some said I was spoiled. Maybe that is true. But I was angry. Angry that Ma had died. Angry that my father was often away. I would break the things he gave me. I’d take my anger out on those around me. I wanted him to die and have Ma back instead. I tried to hurt everyone I loved. My grandmother used to say, ‘I see you, Savanh. I see you.’ She meant she could see into me, right into my soul and the person I really was inside.”
I ran my hands across Sôok-dìi’s stomach, over the shaved skin. I traced my fingers over the reddened needle marks.
Savanh rested her hand on mine. “I see you, Tam.”
“Savanh!” We both turned. Savanh snatched her hand away from mine. Talin was walking toward us. He glanced between us. “Your father is looking for you.” He wrinkled his nose up at Sôok-dìi. “Come, Savanh,” he said. He pulled her away. “He’s not clean.”
As I watched them walk away, I wondered if he was talking about Sôok-dìi or me.
I sponged water into Sôok-dìi’s dry mouth and closed the cage door. He licked the water but didn’t take the biscuit crumbs. His breathing was labored, each breath ending with a grunt. I thought of Mama Bear the night before she died. I felt his paws through the bars. Once soft and smelling of earth, they now were hard and cracked like the other bears’. His stomach was poked and riddled with needle marks, his fur coarse and bare where he’d rubbed himself against the bars. He’d lost his trust in humans. He’d lost his trust in me. It seemed that the promise I had made him was as distant as the far mountain forests. Sôok-dìi was just like the other bears here.
Sôok-dìi was a farmed bear now.
After the Doctor left, I stayed in the bear farm. I pulled up a stool and sat beside Sôok-dìi, stroking his head. He felt hot; his nose was dry and cracked. He drifted in and out of sleep. I left the barn doors open and watched the sky turn a fiery red.
Kham slipped through the gates.
“Tam?” he said, squinting into the darkness.
I waved him over. “Is there a problem?”
Kham’s eyes fell on Sôok-dìi. “Ma wants to see you. Pa, too.”
I frowned. “What have I done?”
Kham shrugged his shoulders. “Ma wants to see you now.”
“Okay,” I said, “but I must come back to sit with him.” I closed the cage and followed Kham across the road into his house. His father was sitting at the table, and his mother was frying sweet coconut balls of rice. The smell of burned sugar and coconut filled the room. She tipped them onto a wide plate, scattered some pieces of lime, and put the plate in the middle of the table.
“Sit down,” she said.
I glanced at Kham and he sat down too. His mother pushed the plate and offered me one. I took one and looked between her and her husband.
She was the one to speak. “Kham told us what happened to the money you earned.”
I looked at Kham. Had he told them about Sôok-dìi being a dancing bear?
His mother pulled some money from her apron and counted it out onto the table. “This is for your journey back home.”
“Home?” I said.
She nodded. “You must take this and go back to your family. I would say you could stay here, but it would not be good for the Doctor to see you around.”
I stared at the money. “I can’t,” I said.
She pushed the money toward me. “Tam, I hear that General Chan’s daughter has taken a turn for the worse.”
I looked up at her and tried to read her face.
She sat down beside me and took my hand. “When people realize that the Doctor’s bear is not a Golden Bear after all, the Doctor will not be a good person to be around.”
Kham’s father was sitting, watc
hing me, slowly chewing his rice.
“I can’t leave Sôok-dìi,” I said.
Kham looked at his parents. “I told you he’d say that.”
His mother leaned forward. “Tam. It will not be safe for you to stay.”
I turned the rice ball around and around in my hand, watching the grains of sticky rice glue together and reform in my hands. I couldn’t eat. I put the rice down and pushed the plate away. “Will you help me?” I asked.
They both looked at me.
I had to fight back the tears. Maybe this was my only chance. “Will you help me get Sôok-dìi away from here?”
Kham rolled his own rice ball around and around in his hand. “I told you he’d say that, too.”
Kham’s mother held my hands. “General Chan is a powerful man. He still believes this bear will save his daughter, his only child. Anyone who tries to stop this would be in deep trouble.”
I clenched my hands together beneath hers.
She pushed my chin up. “And anyway, where would we take him? We can’t just release him into the wild.”
I looked at her. “I’d look after him. I know the forests.”
She smiled. “Tam,” she said. “What sort of person would I be to send a boy off into the forest with a bear?”
I closed my eyes. “He will die here,” I said. “He will never know what it is like to be free.”
Kham’s father leaned forward. “Tam,” he said. “You must not stay here for the sake of a bear. This is not your battle.”
I sank my head onto the table. But it is! I wanted to shout. This is my battle too.
Mrs. Sone was right. Savanh was sick again. She became too sick to come back again to the bear farm. Mrs. Sone was right about the Doctor, too. He took out his frustration on the bears. He thumped the cages with his metal bar, shouting at them and slamming the end of his bar through the cages onto their flanks. Asang followed behind, keeping his distance.
The Doctor came to Sôok-dìi’s cage, leaned against it, and stared in. Sôok-dìi had curled up into a tight ball. He’d hardly eaten in the week since Savanh’s last visit. He’d only taken some melon from me the night before. I’d seen the wound on his belly. The skin around it was crusty and hard. It was red and bleeding where Sôok-dìi had scratched it with his claws.
“Asang,” yelled the Doctor, banging the bars of Sôok-dìi’s cage, “we need to milk the Golden Bear. General Chan wants double the amount of bile today. He rang to say he wants the Mountain Boy to take it to his house today.”
I looked up. Why did General Chan want me?
The Doctor poked the end of his bar into a fresh pile of bear mess. “Hey! Mountain Boy! Come here.”
I walked over to him, my palms slick on the broom handle.
The Doctor continued poking the mess beneath the cage. I could see the melon seeds in a pool of pale diarrhea. “What have you been feeding these bears?”
“I give them what Asang brings from the market,” I said.
The Doctor glared at me and spat on the ground. “Fresh fruit? No wonder he’s ill.”
I stared at Sôok-dìi and said nothing. To say sorry or to argue was to ask for another beating.
The Doctor turned back to Sôok-dìi. “Mountain Boy. You will stay and help this time.”
I put the broom down and watched while Sôok-dìi was sedated and carried to the treatment room. I watched the Doctor stab him with the needle. The picture on the ultrasound scan wasn’t clear. A white fuzz. The Doctor hit the screen several times, but the screen didn’t change. I watched beads of sweat form on his forehead and drip onto Sôok-dìi’s fur. The Doctor breathed out a grunt of relief when bile started to flow through the needle and the tube into the collecting flask.
When no more bile would come, the Doctor held up the bottle. We could all see it was barely enough.
“Mountain Boy. Come with me.”
I followed the Doctor into the office. He pulled a stopper from a vial and added the contents of the flask inside. He sealed it with the golden seal of his farm, wrote a note, and slid it into the envelope. He held the bottle just above my hand and leaned forward. “Why does the general want you to take this to his house?”
I stared at the bottle. “I don’t know.”
“You wouldn’t be spreading lies about me, would you? Telling the general my bile is no good?”
“No,” I said.
I could feel the Doctor’s eyes on me. He pressed the bottle into my hand. “Take this to General Chan’s house for his daughter. Tell him there will be more at the end of the week.”
I nodded and took the bottle from him, slipped it in my pocket, and set out across the city. The sun was shining, but the sky was metal blue, expecting rain.
I crossed the city and climbed the hill road. The distant hills were blurred by the coming storm. Savanh’s house didn’t seem so big and grand now. It reminded me of Sôok-dìi’s golden cage. A show, a sham. I knocked on the door and was met by the lady who had opened it before.
“Please, come in. Savanh would like to see you.”
I followed her through the house, up marble steps, and into a room overlooking the gardens and the animals. Savanh was propped up against cushions in a wide bed.
She smiled. “You came. I asked my father’s secretary to ask for you to come.”
I frowned. So it was Savanh who wanted me here, not the general. “I brought this,” I said, holding up the small bottle of bile.
Savanh looked pale, her skin the blue-gray color of rain-dampened wood ash. Her cheeks were hollow, and she’d lost more weight just in the past week.
She tried to raise herself up a little. “How is Sôok-dìi?” she asked.
I put the bottle on the table beside her and went to stand by the window. I stared down into the garden. “He’s not good.”
“You know,” said Savanh, “I wanted a marbled cat so badly that I begged and begged my father. When he brought me one as a kitten, he said he’d found it lost and wandering in the forest.”
I looked down at the marbled cat, pacing in its world.
“Maybe you are right, Tam, and people tell my father things he wants to hear. But maybe we only hear those things we want to hear, too. Sometimes the truth can be too hard to bear.”
I didn’t know what to say. The storm’s blue sky darkened the room.
Savanh leaned forward. “Tam, this bear cannot cure me. I know that. I think deep down my father knows that too, but he is a man who will not give up trying until the end.”
“Are you scared?” I said.
Savanh smiled again, but it was bittersweet. “Maybe, a little,” she said. “But I think of the time I walked through the shadows in the forest. It made me stop and wonder at those moments in the sunlight. It made me realize just how beautiful it was.”
Raindrops began to patter on the window. I watched them chase one another in crooked lines down the glass.
“Tam,” said Savanh. “There is something I wish you to do.”
I turned to look at her.
“I want you to take Sôok-dìi back to the mountains.”
“How?” I said. “He is sick and your father would not allow it.”
Savanh pointed to a silk purse on her bedside table. “Please pass it to me.”
I leaned across and handed it to her.
“Here,” she said, pulling out bills of money. “I want you to have this.”
I frowned. “I don’t want your money.”
“Take it, Tam,” she said. “You may need it.”
I stared at the money in my hands.
Savanh pulled a mobile phone from her purse and started tapping on the keys. “All this week I have been thinking of a plan to give Sôok-dìi his freedom. I want you to take Sôok-dìi and leave this city.”
I looked up at her. “When?”
Savanh put the phone to her ear and smiled once more. “You will leave tonight.”
Savanh finished speaking on the phone. “Talin will help you.”
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“Talin? But he doesn’t like me. He doesn’t like bears!”
Savanh smiled. “He says he will take you.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Talin and I are old friends. We go way back to childhood. He will pick you up at the bear farm at dusk tonight.”
“Where will he take me?”
Savanh slipped her phone back in her purse. “I looked at some of my father’s papers in his office and found where your old village used to be. Talin will take you as far as he can.”
I pushed the money deep in my pocket. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Let Sôok-dìi feel his freedom.”
I just stood there, watching the patterns of light change on the walls as a cloud passed overhead. A light breeze drifted through the room, bringing the promise of rain.
Footsteps in the corridor outside broke the silence.
Savanh turned her head toward the door. “It is my father coming,” she said. She reached under her pillow and pulled out an envelope. “Take this too. If my father finds you or stops you, give him this. Tell him it is a letter from his daughter.”
I stuffed the envelope down my shirt as General Chan walked through the door.
General Chan stopped and stared between us. “Savanh?”
“Father,” said Savanh. “Tam has brought the treatment from the bear farm.”
General Chan glanced at the flask of bile on the table and then at me.
Savanh put her head to the side and smiled. “Well, good-bye, Tam, and good luck.”
General Chan tucked the sheet around Savanh’s shoulders and looked back at me. My head felt light and white inside. I wanted to say something. But the moment had gone. I turned and walked down the marble steps and into the pressing heat outside.