The Blue-Eyed Shan

by Becker, Stephen;

  “I hope he reached home,” Jum-aw said.

  “He reached home. I imagine he even won a second medal, for surviving the jump. Medals were awarded for everything but outright treason.”

  “You dislike wars.”

  “Correct. Three-handed rogues attack the wind with loud shouts, and are promoted and enriched. Meanwhile good men die. Well, will you go back or will you come along?”

  “I have guided you, now you shall guide me,” Jum-aw said.

  “And my wages?”

  For a moment Jum-aw took him seriously.

  A few hours later, when he knew he was home, Greenwood halted. “Look there.” Half a skeleton hung from a tree. “A bandit. Give me your rifle.”

  Jum-aw only scowled.

  “Do as I ask, Jum-aw. Give me obedience for my wages.”

  Jum-aw went on scowling, but unslung his rifle and handed it over.

  “A genuine antique,” Greenwood said. “That is some weapon.”

  “It fires true.”

  “Your father’s?” It was a Springfield .30-03, almost half a century old; but its makers and owners had respected metal.

  “My father’s. Since a boy.”

  “Now your knife.”

  Jum-aw protested.

  Greenwood said it again.

  Jum-aw yielded.

  Greenwood slung the rifle and tucked the knife into his belt. “Follow close.”

  “And if there is fighting?”

  “It would be no fighting, only the quick death of two travelers. When the thunderclap sounds, it is already too late to cover the ears. We proceed empty-handed, smiling and singing.”

  They did no signing, but at intervals Greenwood called out, “I will wrestle Wan and Kin-tan at one time!” or “Old Mong is a famous fornicator!” His chest was tight, as before a fire fight or with a new woman. They were rising circuitously but persistently from the valley west of West Slope. A faint haze hung above what he thought was the village. He wondered if a house was burning. More likely a plot of brush.

  One moment he was riding along, composing an elegant insult, and the next he was overwhelmed by a horde of Shan who scared him half out of his tattoos. They surged and swarmed, seizing the bridles, shouting at Greenwood, dropping from trees, hemming him about. The ponies boggled at first but stood their ground. Greenwood whooped and hollered, vaulted off his steed and commenced whacking old friends. Old friends pummeled him in return. He heard Jum-aw—“My lord! My lord!”—and craned to see the boy in Kin-tan’s embrace, pedaling vainly a yard in the air.

  By now there were tears in Greenwood’s eyes. “By the gods,” he said, “what a reception! I never heard a sound.”

  “We saw you half an hour ago,” Wan assured him. “Old Green Wood! Never did I think to see you more.”

  “Nor I you, you old killer. Kin-tan, put down that boy. Or have you taken to monkish love?”

  Kin-tan released Jum-aw and embraced Greenwood. “I never thought of that. He is a pretty boy. And how goes the old rifle?”

  “Well. The gods have been kind.”

  The others were subsiding. A flight of forest crows, blue-shouldered, flapped above them.

  Greenwood wiped his eyes with his bandanna. The others glanced at the crows, or fiddled with their weapons. Greenwood said, “Is Loi-mae well? And Lola?”

  “Well and happy,” Kin-tan said.

  “The gods be thanked. And who is dead?”

  “Phe-win. Dropped one noon like an old oak.”

  “Let him rest. The best of fighting men.”

  “My father Yau,” said Wan.

  “Let him rest. A good man and kind to me.”

  “Gyan died only a couple of months ago,” Kin-tan said, “in a fight by the wide road.”

  “Let him rest. You took revenge?”

  “Many times over. A couple of the old women died, old Pham, and Hu-mei of the thin lips and big teeth. Do you recall them?”

  “I recall everyone,” Greenwood said. They were walking toward the crest now, leading the ponies, strolling and chatting like a club or a team. “And the Sawbwa?”

  Wan said. “He is the same.”

  Greenwood caught the dry tone. “Before I forget: treat this boy well. His name is Jum-aw and he guided me up from Kunlong.”

  “A city boy,” Kin-tan scoffed, but he made Jum-aw the gift of one curt nod.

  Greenwood returned the boy’s rifle and knife. Jum-aw worked at a smile, and then a swagger.

  Kin-tan went on, “Did he guide you well?”

  “He let me smoke a cheroot one night and we woke up with half the bandits in Burma pissing on our fire.”

  A shout of laughter rewarded him. “So you surrounded them,” Wan said.

  “I was lucky. One was an old friend from up Bhamo way. I tell you, they scared me white.” He used the Shan phrase without thinking and no one noticed; but he noticed.

  “And here you are,” Wan said. “This is a good thing. Ko-yang and Cha were married today and you come to bring them luck.”

  “Luck! I came for the feast. Tell me, who is First Rifle? You, Wan?”

  “No. A good soldier called Naung. You never knew him. Where is he anyway?”

  “He was with us,” Kin-tan said.

  Their shadows were long upon the path; the sun rode low behind them.

  Wan said, “Ai-ya.”

  No one spoke for a bit. Greenwood understood.

  The Sawbwa jittered and jigged. “Green Wood! Green Wood!”

  Greenwood bowed, then patted the old man’s shoulder. The Sawbwa had his name right, which was sufficient unto the day. The Sawbwa gurgled happily. “An omen! Did I not say?”

  “Indeed,” Wan agreed, with the look of one trying to remember.

  Za-kho made syllables.

  Mong whacked him on the back of the head. “Eh, Chung will be happy! Many a time she smacked her lips over you!”

  “What! I never knew!” Greenwood played the fierce thwarted lover. They were encircled by half the village, all chattering and chirping laughter on the festive field. “Ko-yang, what have you done?”

  “What many a better man did before me,” Ko-yang called cheerily, pleased by Greenwood’s notice. He had been only a boy. He laid a husband’s hand on Cha’s shoulder.

  “My friend and guide Jum-aw,” Greenwood announced. “Will you treat him as your own?” Where was Loi-mae? Where was Lola?

  “And why not!” It was Chung, elbowing irrepressibly through the crowd. She burst toward him and they embraced, and she too whacked away at him, the top of his head, his shoulders.

  “So, mother of us all, I see you well.”

  “You see me well.” Chung drew back for a more leisurely inspection. She turned her head and spat betel juice. “Pale,” she said, “but still strong. I remember how skinny you were ten years ago.”

  “Chung, come closer.”

  They spoke aside, quietly, beneath the crowd’s chatter.

  “Loi-mae,” Greenwood said, “and Lola. Instruct me.”

  Chung’s pause conveyed a judicious melancholy. “They are well. Lola is a little goddess. Now listen: Loi-mae is the woman of Naung, who is—”

  “First Rifle.”

  “Yes. It is my feeling that you must not try to cook on ashes.”

  “I will do no harm,” Greenwood said, remembering Horse-master’s definition of wisdom.

  “Who can ask more? But can it be? There was much love.”

  “There was.”

  “And when one loves another, one loves even the dogs and cats.”

  “I remember the saying.”

  “And to love without due regard to what is right is to anger the nats of the hearth.”

  “I will do no harm,” Greenwood said. “Can we go to them now?”

  He followed Chung up the trail to Loi-mae’s house. He supposed it was Naung’s house now. Naung’s absence was understandable but awkward; better to meet, let Greenwood indicate acceptance, even submission, and have done with it.r />
  In his left hand he carried a slender gift for Lola. She was nine now, nine and a half, and what did girls desire at nine and a half? Greenwood had been altogether uncertain. He was not yet sure what they wanted at nineteen and a half or twenty-nine and a half. He had passed a disgusted half-hour in a toy shop, examining doll-houses, tricycles, board games, tinny sets of tableware, scooters; he had decided that East was East and West was West and it was better that they not meet, not on this level, at any rate. Lola might have appreciated a small inlaid bow and half a dozen arrows—archery was now obsolete and fashionable among the Shan, like hunting in England or horse-drawn sleighs in America. But he had recalled that at the age of ten the women of Pawlu were presented with ceremonial daggers, which they were thenceforth entitled to wear at the waist, and he had found a genuine dagger of Lapland, of Swedish steel with a haft of reindeer antler and a sheath of hardened reindeer leather lined with lamb’s wool.

  And now this path, and the flash of a hoopoe; the last stand of bamboo. The last turn.

  The house was shockingly small. In his memory it was spacious and sprawling, love’s mansion; in life it was no more than twenty feet by twenty. Would Loi-mae too be small, squat, weathered? The memory of Eden. How many hundred nights of young love, all ideal, the age, the body, the climate, the rules there to be broken one by one, all life a dazzlement and an exploration, and in spring the night breeze suffused with wild rose and honeysuckle.

  He stood aside, the stranger, the guest, to let Chung pass before. “Here he is!” She padded inside, and Greenwood followed. “He looks well enough,” Chung went on. “Neither starving nor diseased.”

  Loi-mae was not small, squat, weathered. She was the same Loi-mae, rangy for a Shan, oval brownish face, eyes and lips to drown in. Greenwood took one step and halted; went blank and then shy; swallowed; felt love’s surge and swell, and the hint of an ebb. Loi-mae shut her eyes in joy and held forth both hands. “O Loi-mae!” he said, and kissed the hands. She sighed then, a long-drawn musical breath, hugged him tight, and averted her lips when he kissed her face. “Ah no,” he said, held her chin, kissed her again, a lingering kiss and a molten kiss, lips melting, tongue soft, body straining. He groaned aloud. Would you stay? Would you fight for her? Take her back?

  There came a tug at his jacket.

  Lola stared up at him, moon-eyed, sweet, timid, awed, hoping to smile. Loi-mae had gone limp in his embrace, only the clutch of her arms still tight.

  “Lola!” he cried. Do no harm. Loi-mae released him, and a look passed between them of almost inhuman intensity—a look of grief, of joy, of fear, of understanding. We have stolen our years of glory, this look said, of perfection, of bliss; we have been like gods; and now it is for the gods to do what they will with us; what they cannot do is annul those years.

  He stooped like any father to take Lola by the waist and hoist her high. Like any child, she squealed and shrieked. “O Green Wood! O Father!” He smothered her, nuzzled, held her off for a stern scrutiny. “Why, you are almost a woman!” he said. “And a beauty like your mother!” Loi-mae’s perfume was still in his nostrils, and the memory of her embrace still warm. A faint spicy odor: the ginger on her breath. The house too: aromas of pepper and grease. He remembered faint latrine smells when the wind shifted.

  Chung had slipped away. Loi-mae stood smiling bravely, eyes bright; she blinked, the smile dissolved. “You are hungry,” she said. She raised a startled hand to her lips: “Yet what is that to me?”

  “How could I think of food?” he asked. “You too, you are a beauty; there is none so beautiful anywhere.”

  For another hot moment there seemed nothing to say.

  Greenwood made an effort. “Have you been well? And Lola?”

  “She had chicken skin two years ago. No scars, as you see.”

  Lola asked, “Have you come to take me away?”

  “O poor Lola!” Loi-mae cried, and hugged her. “No, no, no, would we let him do that?”

  Lola teased: “And if I want to go?”

  “And leave Weng-aw?”

  “Who is Weng-aw?” Greenwood asked.

  “A boy who flirts and paws.”

  “By the gods,” Greenwood said huffily.

  Lola asked, “Have you a child in your own country?”

  “Of course he has,” Loi-mae answered swiftly, as if forestalling pain. “Enough pestering.”

  “No wife and no child,” Greenwood said, and saw pleasure suffuse Loi-mae’s face.

  “But women,” she murmured.

  “Well, a few, but none like Loi-mae, with the tall swaying beauty of rushes and the melting eyes of the gyi.”

  Her pleasure deepened, her smooth tan cheeks mantled, but she rebuked him: “You must not say so. Have you met Naung?”

  “No.”

  “He is a good man. He has been loving with Lola.”

  “Good indeed, as all say. And he is First Rifle.”

  She meditated for some moments, saying then, “I never spoke of him, but he wanted me before you came, and I sent him away. He was a soldier in Laos and Tonkin.”

  “A traveled man and surely a good soldier. Lola”—he shifted ground—“I have brought you a gift; not much, but from the heart.”

  “Green Wood!”

  “Loi-mae,” he said more quietly, “I bring no gift, only myself. I could not know if I had the right.”

  “It will do,” Loi-mae assured him. “As well you brought nothing; but for Lola, yes.”

  “Naung is … a difficult man?”

  “No more so than any man. But you were wise to refrain.”

  He saw again the stacked wooden bowls, the larger pot, the quern to grind grain or pepper. The hanging straw mat was rolled away now. At night it would hang where it had always hung, and Loi-mae and Naung would enjoy privacy.

  “What, then? What have you brought me?” Lola cried. “Do you tell and not give?”

  “Some daughter,” Greenwood grumbled. “Who has taught this one manners? Or omitted to?” He held forth the package. “For my beautiful Lola.”

  Lola tore at the thick brown paper. As the scabbard came into view she exclaimed, ecstatic. “O! It is mine?”

  “And you must care for it as a warrior would.”

  “Where is it from? Who made it?” She drew the knife and danced a few ceremonial steps, slashing.

  “It is from a land in the far north,” he said, “with snow and ice the whole year, and it was made by men who wear furs and hides the whole year. The haft is carved from the antler of a northern gyi, and the sheath is of his hide.”

  “Green Wood!” She rushed to fling her arms about him.

  “Ow! Put that thing away! Fine thanks! You pricked me.”

  “I love it,” she said again. “I will wear it always.”

  Wear it when that Weng-aw comes around.” But Loi-mae was waiting, Loi-mae had more to say, or perhaps did not, and expected more of him, or pehaps not. He felt once more gangling and young.

  “I am glad with all my heart that life has been good to you,” he said, and the simple speech rang awkward and insufficient.

  “I am glad with all my heart that you remained solid and did not shrink away,” Loi-mae said lightly. “You were skin and bones when I first set eyes on you.”

  “I was still growing up. Without you I would not have become a man. Even now I am not fully a man without you.”

  “Do not talk so. It is not seemly now. Besides, it was fighting and killing that made a man of you.”

  There was justice in that. It was a pleasantly neutral and gossipy statement. Greenwood had, over the previous month, steeled himself to a variety of possible emotions at this reunion, a resurgence of love, sudden revulsion, remorse, dismay, mellow friendship, chatty indifference. He was perturbed now to feel embarrassment, like a man taken in adultery, or an impostor.

  Loi-mae and Lola were prosperous and happy, and he could think of nothing original to say.

  Yang. His mind leapt to General Yang and h
is old bones. Where was the smiler now? If Yang was dead, if Greenwood lingered here too long … Do no harm.

  “Can he not sit down?” Lola asked. “He is my father and this is my house. Who will sleep here tonight? Green Wood or Naung?”

  Greenwood and Loi-mae burst into relieved laughter.

  At sunset—early, as West Slope cheated them of an hour—Greenwood and a ten of leaders sat upon the grass outside the Sawbwa’s house. The Sawbwa was jubilant, strutting about in an old, genuine Arikara headband from North Dakota, of buffalo hide. Greenwood had considered bringing him a full-feathered war bonnet of the kind sold in souvenir shops, but was now sufficiently mature to dismiss condescending frivolities. Trouble enough when some future savant found a Pawnee headband in a Shan village. For the people of Pawlu he had brought five hundred rounds of ammunition, 7.65 millimeter and .30 caliber. This was a gift of importance, and the council had assembled in a relaxed and jollified mood. Za-kho instructed Ang-ang the Woman-in-Common to serve them. There was Wan; there was Kin-tan; there was Mong; there were half a ten more; and there was Naung. Jum-aw was off lying to Chung’s daughters about the big town.

  No one had said, “Green Wood, this is Naung,” or “Naung, this is Green Wood.” No one had to. The American sat cross-legged and Ang-ang set before him hot pork, glutinous balls of rice, a bowl of chicken and spices. He sniffed, and his soul was replete. His teabowl was replenished. He waited until all were served and Za-kho had pronounced a blessing.

  As they fell to then, his eyes met Naung’s. Both took the moment calmly, neither speaking nor nodding. The conversation remained general—crops, weather, the war in China. Greenwood told them that all was quiet over by Sumprabum, Myitkyina and Bhamo. The sun set, but light lingered long in the clear sky. “This afternoon I saw a cloud,” Za-kho reported.

  “I saw it too,” Naung said. “A little rain would not go amiss.”

  Greenwood had disliked Naung’s face at first glance, a tough, suspicious face with an aggressive jaw and theatrically rich black brows; now he noted the fine teeth and sympathized with the sparse but ambitious beard.

  “There will be no rain yet,” the Sawbwa said.

  On this matter he was never wrong, Greenwood remembered.