A Taste of Cockroach

by Allan Baillie

  ‘I didn’t know that you could do that,’ said Dave softly.

  ‘I didn’t know I could do that either …’ Mon was watching his hands slightly trembling.

  But Dave was shrugging. ‘Ah, anyone can do that.’ He looked around him until his eyes locked on the other tree.

  The other tree was not quite as high as he was and its top was at least ten metres from him, but he could see its branches stroking against the branches of his tree. The branches carried a sea of green needles between the two trees.

  ‘Now what about this, then …’ Dave said.

  And he leaped into the air.

  ‘No!’ Mon yelled.

  Dave opened his arms, for a moment hanging in the sky, like an eagle with the clouds. He glided towards a branch thick with needles on the top of the other tree, and began to close his arms. His body touched the branch, his arms swung round it.

  The branch creaked loudly and dipped – as if it had suddenly snapped. It plunged between the other branches.

  Helplessly Mon reached across as Dave slid along the slippery needles towards the tip of the branch. For an instant he turned to Mon, opening his mouth wide, then he dropped into a dark hole. The branch bounced back to close the hole.

  There were several crashing sounds, then a heavy thud.

  ‘Dave!’ Mon shouted. ‘Dave! Are you all right?’

  Nothing.

  He’s not all right, Mon thought. He can’t be.

  Mon swung off his branch and hurtled down the trunk, skipping steps and handles. He didn’t go round the trunk as he had come up – this time he flowed down the tree like a waterfall. Catching bare twigs to control his tumble.

  It’s a long, long fall, Mon thought as he moved. But he had all the branches to slow him down. Please, please.

  Mon’s feet thumped on the ground. He staggered from the trunk and stopped dead.

  ‘Oh.’

  Dave was lying on the rough mud, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Near him was Coloss, hoofing the earth.

  ‘Out! Get away!’ Mon ran forward, grabbed a piece of clay and hurled it at Coloss, but the bull shook his shoulders and lowered his gleaming horns.

  Mon clutched the fence and shook it desperately. ‘Go! Stoppit!’

  He’s not paying me any attention, Mon thought. I might as well be in another country. I will have to go into the bull’s paddock …

  Mon froze, his hands locked on the wire. His eyes stared past Coloss.

  I can’t do it, he thought.

  Coloss took a step towards Dave, pitching his horns in the air.

  Mon hissed like a punctured tyre, closed his fists many times – then spun from the barbed-wire fence and ran away.

  Coloss jerked his head up and blew steam after him.

  Mon turned again. ‘Oh boy, oh boy …’ He clapped his hands once, as if waking himself. Then he ran at the fence. He bounced into the muddy puddle, grabbed the rusty wire between the barbs and swung his legs over the fence. His feet thumped down in the shadow of Coloss. He staggered and dropped to one knee.

  Coloss blinked at him and shuffled his hooves.

  Mon leaped to his feet and for a moment he looked at Dave. He was sprawled in the earth with his mouth sagging into the mud. He looked very still, apart for a slow ticking of a finger.

  He could be dead, Mon thought. No, he can’t!

  Coloss stamped his feet.

  Mon whistled loudly and clapped. ‘Hey! Hey, stupid! Yes, you. I’m talking to you.’

  Coloss creaked his massive head towards Mon.

  ‘Yeah, you! Coloss, hah! More like a colossal sausage. You move like a sausage, but you’re too dumb to be a sausage!’ Mon danced around as he shouted.

  Coloss looked down at the still Dave and looked again at the capering Mon.

  ‘Ah, you’ll never catch me! Not in a million years!’

  And finally Coloss began to lumber after Mon.

  Mon swallowed and ran back a few steps.

  Coloss shambled across the chopped grass, flexed his muscles and thudded his hooves.

  Suddenly Mon was retreating rapidly, shuffling his feet over themselves. He realised that Coloss was building up speed as he moved, like a locomotive, and he didn’t know how fast Coloss could go.

  Coloss quivered his black tail and began to trot. Mon hissed in alarm, trying to sprint backwards until he snagged his ankle on a weed. He fell sideways as the bull thundered down on him, but reached out in time to touch the ground with a single finger. He was staggering, but he was still moving.

  He gathered his legs beneath him in five long strides as the bull steamed past him. Coloss tried to turn, to chase him, driving those solid legs deep into the earth, but his bulk – a tonne of meat – had been launched and it was very hard to change direction. The bull roared and snorted away from Mon, turning as he charged, with all the nimbleness of an oil tanker.

  ‘Hey!’ panted Mon. ‘I beat you!’ He was shaking from his feet to his shoulders. He didn’t believe what had happened, but his face wore a funny smile.

  Coloss shuffled around to face Mon and stopped. He held his horns low, hoofed the ground, steam coiled from his nostrils, and he fixed his brown eyes on Mon’s face, but the bull did not move from that spot.

  He’s waiting for a chance, Mon thought. He clapped at the bull. ‘Come on, cow! I beat you then, I can beat you any time …’ I sound like Dave, he thought.

  He swallowed and looked back at the still body. He hasn’t moved. He can’t be dead.

  Then he heard the thundering and swung around.

  Coloss had used the moment of Mon’s wandering eyes to launch an attack. The bull was now so close that Mon could smell his steaming breath, the horns were scything at his chest.

  Mon shouted in fright and leaned sideways. He wasn’t aware of moving his feet at all, but the bull’s horns whirled past Mon’s ear, the immense body swept by with the tail flicking Mon’s hair in passing.

  Dave had lifted his elbow. Coloss saw the movement as he turned towards Mon and propped.

  ‘No, no, you stupid hamburger!’ Mon ran ahead of the bull, waving his arms.

  Coloss hesitated, swaying his massive head from the groping Dave to the noisy clown. Mon danced and whistled very closely to him and Coloss shuffled away from Dave.

  But then Dave sat up.

  Coloss grunted and stared at him. Dave blinked as if he was trying to work out whether he was still sleeping. He frowned at the dancing Mon. Dave groped for his forehead and Coloss snorted at him angrily and lowered his head.

  ‘No, no!’ shrieked Mon, capering two metres from the horns.

  Dave widened his eyes as he realised what was happening. Coloss was not interested in Mon any more.

  ‘Hey!’ Mon yelled desperately and shook a hand before the bull’s eyes.

  But Coloss had fixed his eyes on Dave and was accelerating.

  Mon ran alongside Coloss and slapped him across the nose. It sounded like a drum beat. And it stopped the charge.

  ‘Oh boy,’ Dave whispered.

  Coloss turned his head to Mon in confusion. His eyes filled with rage and he charged. Mon ran flat out across the paddock, weaving, twisting, ducking, trying to keep away from those horns.

  ‘Hey, dummy!’ It was Dave, booming across the paddock.

  That’s not nice, Mon thought as he panted. After what I’ve done …

  ‘Get here!’

  No, no. He’s yelling at Coloss. Maybe.

  Mon turned, and saw that Dave was on the other side of the fence waving at him. He dodged a charge and sprinted for the fence. Dave threw a few clumps of clay over his head. Mon could feel the breath of Coloss on his legs.

  ‘Go, go!’ Dave yelled.

  Mon leaped before he reached the fence, clearing the barbs without touching anything. He heard a mighty crash into the fence behind him. Coloss had stopped.

  * * *

  Dave sprawled on the sea wall two days later, looking down into the deep green water. ‘He
y, there’s stingrays down there.’

  Mon tilted back his hat. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Straight down.’ Dave stood up.

  Mon peered past the glare of the surface and saw two long shapes cruising coolly around each other in the depths.

  ‘Hey, we could bomb them. Just take a step from here, right on top.’ Dave looked over to Mon. ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ said Mon.

  Dave sat down on the sea wall. ‘Okay.’

  TASTE OF COCKROACH

  In 1969 there was a savage war in Vietnam, which spilled over to Laos and Cambodia. In Laos, the communist Pathet Lao fought the royal government and the CIA in a civil war. I met the characters in this story, but I was the one who was captured.

  The village vendors reached the bus before it came to a stop. For a while it seemed to be drifting in a turbulent sea of dust, children and women carrying baskets with cane sections of rice, brown and yellow sugar water, impaled and curried spiders, hens’ claws and wings. The bus rocked under a long and noisy assault of bare knees and shoulders on its metal sides, the babble of bargaining rose to a low shriek, and the driver closed his eyes and rested on the wheel.

  Yates bought a bag from a sniffling girl and swung clumsily into the cabin, paid the driver and looked for a seat. A Frenchman sat alone towards the back of the bus. He looked like a bankrupt antique dealer on the last train out of Paris. He was the only European on the bus. Yates pursed his lips and picked his way towards him over small piles of clothing, two scrabbling children, and a cane-caged rooster.

  ‘Y’going?’ Yates said, leaning over the Frenchman.

  The Frenchman flicked his eyes up, moved sideways and flicked them down again to an old newspaper.

  Yates sat, disappointed, and the bus lurched clear of the crowd. Suddenly a woman started shouting angrily and running after the bus with a basket of bamboo cylinders on her head. An Indian in front of Yates was holding a small note out of the window and laughing with a friend. Yates leaned forward and plucked the note from the man’s fingers and released it. The woman stopped shouting and snatched it out of the air. The Indian turned angrily, saw Yates, and shrugged.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Yates said. ‘I tell you, that’s about the lowest you can go. Pinching from a rice-seller.’

  The Frenchman grunted.

  Yates looked at him in silence for a while, then said, ‘You’re French.’

  The Frenchman blinked at him.

  ‘I can tell. Just by looking at your face. I can even pick the Chinese from the Japanese. Don’t know how I do it. It’s just instinct. I’m Peter Yates.’ He smiled.

  The Frenchman looked at the battered rucksack at the feet of Yates, his new beard prickling the low glow of his cheeks, his uncertain green eyes that swam behind his glasses like fish in a bowl. ‘Pettit.’ He said it reluctantly.

  ‘Ah … You don’t speak much English?’ Yates tried to remember the French he had learned at school.

  ‘You should not be on this bus, Mr Yates.’

  Yates looked back, surprised. ‘Why?’

  Pettit nodded at the road ahead. ‘Pathet Lao. They do not like Americans.’

  ‘I am not American.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I am Australian. From Brisbane.’

  ‘It is the same.’

  Yates changed the subject. ‘Been here long?’

  ‘Here?’ Pettit smiled. ‘Yes, I would say that. A very long time.’

  ‘I’ve only been here a couple of months. Not enough to get to know much about things, I guess.’

  ‘It is better than two weeks. Countries are all the same.’

  ‘Oh no, never. I mean this place and Brisbane … it’s another planet. You know they sell grass – marihuana – in paper bags in the central market in Vientiane. I got to know some Americans who bought themselves a house and pretty well turned it into an opium den. They get it direct from the Meos. Tried it once. You can’t find that anywhere else, can you?’ Yates rustled his paper bag.

  ‘Who knows?’ Pettit jerked upright. ‘What are you doing?’

  Yates was cautiously lifting a cooked and curried crescent to his mouth. He stopped and looked at Pettit. ‘It’s a cockroach,’ he said. ‘I’m going to eat it.’

  ‘What in hell for?’

  ‘To find out what it tastes like.’

  ‘To find out … It is like you try opium, eh? To find out. It tastes like spiders, grubs, lice. Why don’t you find out what dung tastes like?’

  Yates replaced the cockroach and screwed up the bag in embarrassment. ‘But the Lao eat them like sweets.’

  Pettit looked out the window at the thickening forest.

  ‘Have you ever tasted a cockroach?’ Yates asked.

  Pettit webbed his fingers and studied them. ‘I have eaten cockroaches. I have eaten cockroaches and spiders and flies and ants and anything that got near me uncooked, uncurried, raw and alive because there wasn’t anything else to eat. Please throw those away.’

  Yates leaned over Pettit and threw the bag out on the road. A woman grinned at him through betel-stained teeth. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told Pettit.

  ‘You want to try everything. It is natural.’ Pettit shrugged.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It is not of any importance. You will like Sihanouk’s country. See if you can get to a plantation. They still have the French Empire there. Deer and pig hunting at night. Once we were drinking juleps in a garden and we could look down across the border and see the soldiers and tanks on the ground, fighting, with the bombers in the air. We had a grandstand on the war. Their war.’

  Later, the bus slowed down and pulled into an army outpost manned by three nervous youths. One of the youths, his rifle swinging awkwardly from his shoulder, staggered on board and spoke to the driver. The driver looked over his shoulder at Yates and walked to speak to Pettit in Lao. The entire bus was staring at Yates.

  ‘What is it?’ Yates was watching a boy slowly chewing and grinning at him.

  Pettit sighed. ‘You must leave this bus.’

  ‘Oh. The Pathet Lao?’

  ‘They’re on the road a few kilometres ahead.’

  ‘Are they – the soldiers here – ordering us off?’

  ‘No. I don’t think they care. It’s best to get off and wait.’

  Yates pulled absently at his rucksack. ‘I suppose. But the bus is going on?’

  ‘Yes. This is normal, but they don’t like Americans.’

  Yates started to say something.

  ‘Do you speak French?’

  ‘Not very well.’

  ‘If you don’t speak French you’re an American. To them it is that simple.’

  ‘Yes.’ Yates sighed and slowly got to his feet. He stooped for his rucksack and noticed Pettit had not moved. ‘You’re staying on the bus?’

  The driver hit his horn impatiently.

  ‘I am French. They like us since Dien Bien Phu.’

  Yates hesitated, then dumped his rucksack on the floor and sat down, a little like a small boy defiant over the cereal his mother wants him to eat. ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘If you can go, so can I.’

  ‘Stupid,’ said Pettit.

  The driver started the bus with a jerk. He looked back as if to give Yates another chance to change his mind, and, when Yates made no move, drove steadily down the road.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Pettit asked sadly.

  Yates looked at the Frenchman in growing uncertainty. He groped for a reason and failed. ‘I didn’t … I had to!’

  ‘Another taste?’

  ‘Oh, I spoke to a lot of people who came along this road, and they all said they didn’t have any trouble. I was going to go by plane but you can’t be an old woman all your life, can you?’

  Pettit punched his paper and rammed it into a small bag. He pulled the zip over the paper, dropped the bag, and watched the road ahead. He did not say anything.

  ‘Well, you can’t, can you?’

  Pettit turned. ‘You don’t
want to be a coward?’

  Yates blinked. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say it like that.’

  ‘This is your big adventure, eh? You stay on this bus and you are Errol Flynn. Tell you, Peter, I am a coward. It is the only thing to be. A coward is a man who knows that life is everything and will do anything to keep it. You are wasting it.’

  ‘Anything? Like eating cockroaches?’

  ‘I am alive.’

  Yates looked out at the quiet jungle and sucked a breath through his teeth. ‘All right, I’m frightened. Perhaps they’ve gone away.’ He noticed that the sound in the bus had died to little more than a murmur. The bus was rolling through the trees at a majestic forty kilometres an hour.

  ‘Why does he go so slow?’ Yates said.

  ‘If he goes fast someone may get excited and shoot him.’

  ‘I don’t care if you are a Frenchman. They may shoot you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then why are you on this bloody bus?’

  ‘This is the back road into Cambodge. It is, for me, the safest way.’

  Yates pressed his knees together on his whitening hands.

  ‘They are impatient,’ Pettit said kindly. ‘They may have gone.’

  ‘What do you do, Pettit?’ Yates was hiding behind the words.

  Pettit raised his head defensively. ‘I carry things, Peter, just carry things.’

  A sudden ripple of voices and the bus slowed.

  ‘That’s the end of that.’ Pettit sounded disappointed.

  Two men slouched in the middle of the road ahead and several others lazed in the grass. The two men were leaning on rifles. Yates leaned forward to peer at them and felt sick. He collapsed back in his seat.

  ‘Oh boy,’ he breathed. ‘Will they shoot me?’

  Pettit seemed to have stopped breathing.

  The bus crawled up to the men and stopped. The men in the grass stood up and waded into the settling dust. They all wore shorts, but a few of them had left their shirts in the grass and the shirts that were worn were dirty and frayed. Only one man wore anything on his head and Yates realised with a small shock that it was a GI helmet. The men were all small, young and brown, looking like nothing more than a gang of boys playing cowboys. Except the guns were too big.