Slash and Burn

by Colin Cotterill

  Only one man, it seemed, was not humming the melody of peace and love. To date, Judge Haeng had not engaged Siri in conversation. In fact they hadn’t spoken since before the doctor made changes to the team list. But here, with everyone in a milling mood, he made a beeline to the old coroner and grasped his left hand like a claw crane engaging a sack of rice. He smiled, but not for Siri’s benefit.

  “I haven’t had a chance to thank you for adulterating the personnel list that I’d spent a month finalizing,” he snarled behind his teeth. “I don’t know how you did it, Siri, how you forced the minister’s hand on this, but I promise you I will not forget it. Never. I’m the wrong man to get on the wrong side of and you are firmly on that side, Siri Paiboun. You have tossed able men and women from this work detail, respectable cadres with status and influence and you have replaced them with morons and housewives and senile sociopaths.” (Siri took the latter to mean Civilai rather than himself.) “And you embarrass me further by including my name in your circus ring. It’s all too too bad. A good communist does not shake his comrade by the hand and stab him in the back at the same time.”

  Siri matched the man’s smile.

  “I imagine I’d need a very long knife with a curve on it to achieve such a feat,” Siri said. “Or perhaps a scythe. Yes, that might work. Otherwise I’d have to let go of the hand then run round the back. But, by then you’d know what my intention was, wouldn’t you.”

  “What are you…?

  “Dear Judge Haeng, I don’t need to do anything behind your back. If you ever threaten me again with your menacing handshake, or insult my friends and family, you’ll have me to deal with face to face. What you’ve experienced of me so far is nothing compared to what you’ll get if you don’t back off. You aren’t my boss any more. You’re just another annoying civil servant.”

  He removed his hand from its clammy nest, and left a fuming judge smiling at himself.

  Before heading off to the helicopters, Major Potter singled out Cousin Vinai from the herd and put his arm around the interpreter’s shoulder as if they’d been friends for years. The major yelled to get everyone’s attention, pointed at Vinai and said a few words. There was something in Vinai’s eyes that Siri recalled witnessing in the expression of a deer they’d cornered in a deadend gorge during the fighting. It was that “on a spit by supper time” look. He gazed around desperately for Peach but she was nowhere to be seen. He was on his own.

  “The … er, major would like to say how impressed he is with the record of the Pathet Lao over the first three years of their administration,” said Vinai.

  Judge Haeng and General Suvan clapped but a worm of suspicion had already crawled through the minds of the other onlookers. Siri looked at Dtui who shook her head. Major Potter spoke again. Vinai, still scanning the room for Peach, said, ‘The major is saddened when … he sees so much destruction in this area … caused by the bombing.”

  Haeng and Suvan clapped again. Siri sighed.

  “Vinai, please tell the major we’re interested to know whether he’s been to Laos before,” Civilai shouted.

  “No, this is his first trip,” said Vinai, without translating.

  “Ask him,” said Civilai.

  “I…?”

  “Ask him.”

  Vinai turned to the major, looked up into his puffy face and spoke very quietly. Potter listened attentively then seemed to ask for clarification. Vinai spoke again. The major removed his arm from Vinai’s shoulder and looked around, presumably for Peach. The American spoke once more, slower, enunciating every word with such precision that Mr. Geung could have understood it. Vinai, aware now that his grasp on credibility was slipping, said, “The major was here … on holiday.”

  Like the US cavalry, Peach arrived at that moment and fell into a discussion with Potter. It appeared the major wanted to wish everyone good luck on the day’s mission, lay down a few simple ground rules and inform the teams of the subgroups they’d be working in. Nothing at all about holidays. At some time during this housekeeping talk, Cousin Vinai slunk away.

  When the others were loading the choppers, Siri, Commander Lit, Phosy and Civilai found him hiding in his room and surrounded him. Phosy had been designated the roles of good, bad and only cop while the others looked menacing.

  “Comrade Vinai,” said Phosy.

  “Yes?” said Vinai.

  “The English language.”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you speak it?”

  “I am the head of the foreign languages department affiliated to the Ministry of Justice.”

  “Congratulations. But the question was, do you speak English?”

  “I’ve translated entire documents into Lao.”

  “From English?”

  “Some.”

  “And so you speak it?”

  There followed a long pause during which Vinai appeared to be searching the ceiling for an answer.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  The Lao felt obliged to inform the Americans of this turn of events. In fact, they had no choice. The loss of an interpreter was crucial to their work. They found Peach and took her to the major’s room where the team leader was sitting on the edge of his mattress going over a map of the region. The corner of a crate of whiskey peeked from beneath the bed between his feet. He crossed his legs to hide it. They tried to be as diplomatic and humble as possible, explaining that although Vinai was a leading authority on English language text, he had little opportunity to listen to the spoken form and he found the American accent to be almost incomprehensible. The major seemed unfazed by this news.

  “Major Potter says it’s no big deal,” Peach translated. “We should just use the big woman.”

  Siri assumed the major was referring to Dtui. Yes, she was … not fat exactly but casually ovoid. Definitely not big by American standards. And she most certainly had a vast repertoire of vocabulary that would be ideal when dealing with the forensic surgeon. But he didn’t understand how the major would know such a thing. He stared at Phosy whose buckled eyebrows seemed to mirror his own confusion.

  “How does the major know about Nurse Dtui’s English skills?” Siri asked Peach.

  “He’s not talking about Dtui,” she said after a short interlude.

  “Then…?”

  “He means the large gruff Lao woman who traveled on our helicopter yesterday. I didn’t notice her myself. The major says her English is fluent.”

  “There weren’t any Lao scheduled to travel on your flight apart from the pilots,” Commander Lit said. “I checked the security arrangements.”

  “This one turned up late. Your chopper had taken off and she hitched a ride with us.”

  “But our team was complete, too,” Phosy said, shaking his head. “That’s why we took off. Nobody was missing.”

  “And where is she now?” asked Civilai. “I didn’t notice any strange Lao in the breakfast room.”

  Peach asked the major who laughed and got clumsily to his feet, nonchalantly back-heeling the crate under the bed as he did so. He put his arm around Civilai and led him to the window. He’d obviously missed the cultural sensitivity day at orientation. He pulled the flimsy curtain aside and pointed to a spot way beyond the back fence almost twenty meters into the no-go area. There on a deckchair in a one-piece orange bathing suit was a rotund woman in dark glasses and a sunhat. All this, irrespective of the fact that the morning sun had barely made a crack in the early mist.

  “What on earth…?” said Commander Lit. “None of that land out there has been cleared of unexploded ordnance. Didn’t she see the signs? What’s she playing at? Is she mad? Who is she?”

  But the other Lao in the group knew only too well who had followed them to Xiang Khouang, and it wasn’t a she.

  Auntie Bpoo was as common a figure around the downtown area of Vientiane as Eros was to London and Jesus to Rio. A man, most certainly; deep voiced and pot-bellied and solid as a wad of sticky rice, but a slave to cross-dressing. H
e read palms and predicted the future on street corners and fooled nobody with his zebra-striped tank tops and lime green hotpants. But put him in a silk suit, plaster him in make-up and stick a permed wig on his head and he might just fool a helicopter full of Americans. Because that’s what had happened.

  Far from being angry, Siri was impressed that the fortune-teller had been able to pull it off. The doctor hadn’t an inkling that Auntie Bpoo spoke English, but that didn’t surprise him either. He, she—and she preferred to be called “she”—was a remarkable … woman. Although she pretended that her soothsaying was a scam, that she just wanted an excuse to sit and talk to people, to make friends and be accepted in Lao society, Siri knew for a fact that she had an uncanny gift. Tangled deep in her quirkiness and her unfathomable poems and her mood and gender swings, was a person who actually could see the future. Siri needed someone like her to help explain his own untrained connection to the spirit world. Yet so far she’d played dumb. He wondered whether, here in the wilds of Phonsavan with no escape, he just might be able to get some sense out of her. All that could come later. For now they had to convince her to put on something respectable and take a ride with them to Spook City.

  8

  SPOOK CITY

  The two choppers were nearing Long Cheng. They’d just flown over Sam Thong, ten minutes to the north. It was deserted now but in the early seventies it had housed 150,000 refugees. The US would fly journalists there to view the USAID humanitarian program. They wanted the world to see what a solid job they were doing to help the masses of poor people displaced by the fighting—fleeing the Pathet Lao, they called it. What the administrators didn’t mention was that the refugees were actually fleeing US bombing. Entire areas were evacuated so the CIA’s Hmong fighters had an empty playing field for combat. Chased from their homes, all these displaced people had become dependent on US airdrops. Another thing the journalists didn’t know was that a few kilometers over the ridge was the real war effort, the launch pad for the forward air arm leading up to a thousand sorties a day—Long Cheng.

  The choppers crossed over a saddleback mountain and were careering down into the Long Cheng valley. The highlight of the macadam airfield was a drastic limestone karst at the end of the runway. Fliers called it the vertical airbrake because if you overshot, it was a most effective method of slowing down, albeit terminal. Many of the surrounding huts had been stripped of their tin roofs, and bamboo shacks, victims of neglect, extended far up into the surrounding hills. But there were signs of domestication here and there, suggesting that life might return to the place one day. The helicopters landed beside the old runway. A few dozen ponies were tethered to pipes and shrubs. Already, several hundred people were milling around the ruins of Spook City. They’d probably heard the erroneous rumors about the Americans paying a thousand dollars for old bones and wreckage. Some had traveled for days to this isolated outpost. The theory had been that only the really serious claimants would go to that much trouble. If they’d set up their camp in a town on a main road the searchers would have been inundated. And, as Commander Lit had rightly said, if the explosion of Bowry’s helicopter had been heard from Long Cheng, he really couldn’t have gone that far. The villagers approached the two helicopters and stood with their eyes closed as the rotors kicked up dust. The teams carried their equipment down a shallow dip and along a narrow path. For convenience, they would be working out of General Vang Pao’s old residence. It was a concrete, two-story outer-suburb motel of a place, as incongruous as the shirt-and-tie spooks who’d built it. Although the furniture had been removed, it wasn’t that much less comfortable than the Friendship Hotel. And, as most of the bombing in the region had originated from here, it was quite possible to stroll around without the fear of being blown up.

  Siri remained at Auntie Bpoo’s heels on the walk across the compound, looking for an opportunity to get her alone. When they passed the shell of a concrete hut, he grabbed her arm and dragged her through the open doorway.

  “I could scream, you know,” she told him.

  She made a move for the doorway but Siri blocked her path.

  “They’re used to screams up here,” he said. “Nobody would notice.”

  “Well, what if I smacked you one across the chops?”

  “Smacked me? Really, Bpoo. There are times when you aren’t feminine at all.”

  “Whatever makes you think I’d want to be feminine?”

  “You’re wearing a sarong and a brassiere.”

  “You forced me to dress in a hurry. I had a frock laid out for today.”

  “And that isn’t feminine?”

  “They’re merely garments. Outer coverings. Clothes do not a gender make. If you wore a saddle, would you be a donkey?”

  “If I had a wardrobe full of the things, I’d expect to be called an ass, yes.”

  “Honestly, Dr. Siri. Ancient as you are, you still care what other people think of you. You’re so vain.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “You threw me into a helicopter.”

  “I mean Xiang Khouang. What possessed you to stow away?”

  “I’m very fond of Americans.”

  Siri turned and headed out through the doorway. The word bpoo in Lao meant crab and anyone knew there was no blood to be had from a crab. Experience had taught him that you couldn’t get information from Bpoo if she wasn’t in the mood to share it. He’d just stepped into the sunlight when he heard, “You’re going to die, Siri.”

  He turned back and smiled.

  “Madame Daeng and I have already picked out the coffin. It has a battery controlled fan inside in case it gets stuffy. That’s an extra expense, of course, but I think I’m worth it.”

  “I mean in the next five days.”

  “And you’ve come to watch?”

  “I’ve come to stop it.”

  “Where were you all the other times I died?”

  “This isn’t an “almost died.” This is the real thing; dodo, doornail, dinosaur … that kind of dead.”

  “Real? But I thought you were a charlatan. You told me you make it all up.”

  “I am. I do.”

  “So?”

  Auntie Bpoo sighed, hitched up her sarong and sat untidily on a pile of breeze blocks.

  “Siri, you are so annoying. You and all those heebie-jeebie spirit characters you drag around with you. They know you’re too dense to talk to them but they’re stuck with you. How do you think they feel when their portal to the living is boarded over with a very thick plank and padlocked?”

  “How do you know about them?”

  “I get the odd message.”

  “Then teach me. I’m willing. I want to communicate with them. I want to know what they’re trying to tell me. I’m tired of their cryptic clues. I want to sit down over a cup of instant ether and learn from them.”

  “Honey, you’ve either got it or you haven’t. I’ve got it with bells on. They show me things I’d really rather not see. You? You haven’t got it at all. Your spirit shaman fellow really blew it when he set up shop in you. You’re a dead end for the spirit world.”

  Siri came over and sat cross-legged on the dirt floor in front of Bpoo.

  “Who are they? Who have you seen?”

  “A whole lot of them.”

  “For example.”

  “Oh, dull, dull. All right. Your mother, your ex-dog, a dozen or so confused spirits you’ve picked up along the way. And there’s some really old character who stinks of history.”

  “Yeh Ming. My shaman spirit. Do they talk to you?”

  “Every now and then. I mean the ones that used to be people. The dog just snarls and drools a lot. I have no idea what he wants.”

  “Can you tell me what they say?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to be your telephonist. “Oohoo, Dr. Siri, there’s another call from your mother. Will you accept the charges?” Come on. I have a life.”

  “N
ot much of one.”

  “Bastard!”

  She stood and stormed to the door.

  “I’m sorry,” he called after her. “Really I am. I didn’t mean it. I’m sure your life’s grand.”

  “It is.”

  She stopped in the doorway but didn’t look back.

  “I knew it. So … when am I going to die?”

  She was silent.

  “Bpoo?”

  “Soon, I imagine. Day or two.”

  “Any idea how you’re supposed to prevent it?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Well, good luck anyway. I’m supporting you a hundred per cent on this one.”

  Bpoo turned around and leaned against the door jamb.

  “I … er….”

  “What is it?”

  “I think it might have something to do with sticking a finger in your ear.”

  “The death or the antidote?”

  “I’m not sure. Does it mean anything to you?”

  “It doesn’t sound like a pleasant way to die.”

  “You’re right. Look, I might have got that part wrong. I’ll keep my ears cocked in my bad dreams until I get something more specific.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Would you like a poem now?”

  “It’s the very least I can do.”

  There really was no avoiding Bpoo’s traditional yet meaningless poems. Luckily they only ever ran to one stanza. Some might have analyzed them to see what hidden meaning they contained, but it was invariably better to nod, say “Interesting,” and walk on.

  She began:

  Tomorrow sees,

  Unease blow from the middle east

  The Arab beast

  Takes lives the holy gash

  Exploding aunts

  Lance of fire

  Our daughters, ash

  The guiltless ones

  Sons dashed in God’s name.

  “Finished?” Siri asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting.”

  It was Nurse Dtui who first commented on the makeup of the crowd gathered for the day’s show-and-tell. They were either women, children or men over sixty. The war had wiped out an entire generation of able-bodied young men. And for what? She admired the resilience of the types who’d journeyed up through the hills with hope of a modest reward. She wanted to pay them all but she had little more than they did. Probably all of them would be returning to their villages empty handed. She doubted any would bother to take their offerings home with them. Some had brought half shell casings full of parts on the back of goat carts. Others had spread tarpaulins on the ground and laid out their non-matching bones in the shape of complete skeletons in various cartoon poses. Others had brought souvenirs. One wore a helmet lining that sat on his head like a lampshade. Another was in combat boots five sizes too big for him. An old couple had brought their blond-haired, darkskinned grandson to claim child support. The atmosphere was that of a large MIA boot fair more impressive than anyone on the Lao team had imagined. There were a lot of desperate people in the northeast.