Blood on Celluloid

by B. L. Morgan

  Ron kept his eyes on the two Thais and his finger on the trigger as Candi lowered the knife from the shop owner’s throat, went behind the counter, selected a chrome-plated .45, got some shells, and loaded it.

  When she came back from behind the counter we motioned the shop owner over next to his sons with our pistols.

  We backed toward the door with Ron carrying the loaded duffle bag over his shoulder.

  The shop owner and his two sons looked at us over the counter. “I suppose you are going to kill us now,” the shop owner said.

  “That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I answered him. “But we might be back this way.”

  Ron dug into his pocket and came out with a roll of bills. “There’s two thousand there,” Ron said. “That should more than cover what we got.”

  He tossed the bills to the shop owner.

  “Don’t follow us,” I told them and we left.

  * * *

  We backed out of the alley, expecting at any moment for the door to fly open and someone to start spraying bullets at us.

  It never happened.

  We walked through the narrow streets in the general direction we came from until we came to a wide open street that cars actually drove on and where businesses besides strip clubs and bars were open. We’d passed the border of the extreme ghetto and were back among the land of the living.

  Taxis were driving by; we flagged one down and gave him the address of our hotel.

  On the way, Ron asked Candi, “Where’d you learn how to speak this slop-chewy stuff anyway?”

  “I had a roommate in Chicago. She taught me some. I actually forgot I knew it until those two guys started talking and I recognized some of the words.”

  “Did she teach you some of them Oriental sex techniques?” Ron asked.

  “We weren’t that close,” Candi told him.

  “Yeah,” Ron said. “Well, since we are in this here territory you are going to follow me around and do everything I say, right?”

  “Sure thing,” Candi answered. “Right after hell freezes over.”

  CHAPTER 31

  That night in the hotel room we thoroughly inspected our new toys. All three of our pistols checked out perfectly. Mine was as good as any I’d ever bought back in the states.

  The AKS-74U’s, they were some downright sweet assault weapons. This was a rifle that actually folded up the stock to its side so that it became only about three feet long, small enough to fit in a suit case. The clips were big. They held thirty rounds. Ron had filled up the entire bottom of the duffle bags with loaded clips.

  We were set.

  That guy who cut Sherry’s throat had better be praying and giving his heart to god, because we were coming after him, and his ass belonged to me.

  * * *

  In the morning, we rented a Subaru and Ron paid for our rooms the next month in advance. We figured if we weren’t done with what we had to do, and back here laying over and waiting for a plane within a month, then things had went wrong and we’d more than likely be dead.

  We bought a roadmap that covered the countries of Thailand, Tehan Setar, and Laos and stocked up on some camping gear and bought a couple extra changes of camouflage clothes. We didn’t know if we were going to need this stuff but it wouldn’t hurt having it if we did.

  Then, we headed out of town.

  CHAPTER 32

  Did I say already that it is hot in South East Asia? If I didn’t, well I tell you what, it was hotter than sitting buck naked in a big ass frying pan.

  The air conditioning in the Subaru quit five minutes outside of Bangkok. In ten minutes we were cooking. Opening the windows made it worse. We were sticky, sweaty and miserable. The humidity was extremely high. It must have been somewhere around a hundred and fifty percent. I felt like I was swimming in my clothes and the water was really rank.

  Our clothes stuck to us like wet tissue paper. That was one of the few good things because with Candi’s monster sized tits, with her shirt stuck to her, she was a sight to behold. Made me think that god has got to have one hell of a bad sense of humor to put a dick and balls between that woman’s legs.

  Yeah, Candi was the girl with something extra. It was mind boggling.

  Everything out in the countryside was green and bright. Bright really isn’t the right word for it. The sun was blinding.

  I left Bangkok driving on a four lane highway. Pretty soon that dwindled down to a two lane road.

  The border of Tehan Setar was one hundred and fifty miles from Bangkok, so about seventy miles out, I turned off onto a smaller road, the kind we would call a county road in the states, and followed that north for a few hours.

  The smaller road quickly turned into a dirt road with large pot holes, where we had to pass a lot of ox and mule drawn wagons carrying all kinds of stuff.

  The going got slow, real slow. We maybe averaged five miles an hour.

  I made a few more turns onto roads that I thought would lead us in the general direction of Tehan Setar, when I realized that to be heading in the direction that I thought we should be going, the sun was on the wrong side of the car.

  I told this to Ron and Candi and we all started trying to read road signs to figure out where the hell we were in relation to our map.

  The problem was there weren’t too many signs and what few there were, were only in Thai. And even though Candi knew quite a few spoken Thai words, none of us read Thai.

  We were fucking lost.

  “Man, why didn’t you buy a goddamned compass?” Ron asked me.

  “Yeah, right,” I told him. “Like we’d just head west until we hit the East coast of the U.S., right?”

  “Actually, if you head directly East from here you’ll probably hit Mexico,” Candi told us.

  She was wrong too, so I just told her, “Thanks for the fucking geography lesson. That really helps.”

  “I knew you needed it,” she told me.

  We came around a bend in the road then, bouncing over pot holes hard enough to knock fillings loose. In the distance the road ran through a cluster of short squat houses. Made of mortared together stones with thatched roofs the houses were more like huts than anything else.

  “I’m going to pull in there,” I told Ron and Candi. “I gotta figure out where the fuck we are.”

  When we got closer to the huts I could see that this was a small town of about fifty or sixty of those small dwellings. There were a few wood buildings among the huts that looked like businesses of some sort.

  One of the businesses looked like it might be a restaurant. It wasn’t Red Lobster, that’s for sure, but there were tables and people were sitting and eating inside.

  I parked in front and we went in.

  The people inside were greasy and sweaty and smelled to high heaven. Hard working people were sitting around tables downing beers and eating spicy food.

  We went and sat at a table.

  A skinny old grey haired woman came up to the table.

  “I’ll take a Cervesa,” Ron told the woman.

  “We ain’t in Mexico, dumb-ass,” I told Ron.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Ron said. “I need a fucking beer.”

  Candi said something to the old woman.

  She laughed and answered while pointing at the two of us.

  When she went away Ron asked Candi what that was about.

  Candi said, “I ordered us a round of beers and she told me the two of you remind her of Laurel and Hardy.”

  “Fuck that old bitch,” Ron said.

  * * *

  The beers tasted good.

  Either that or we were so hot and thirsty stagnant piss would have tasted good.

  The first beers went down fast.

  When the old woman came back Candi asked for directions to the Tehan Setar border. The old woman told Candi that she never left the town and didn’t know the way, but we could get directions from the supplies store next door. We got three beers for the road.

  With beers in hand we
headed to the supply store.

  The dusty street was quiet except for the sounds of bird calls coming from trees beyond the cluster of huts.

  The supplies store was really just an Oriental version of an old fashioned General Store. It had everything in it that the local people needed.

  An attractive Asian woman in a blouse and blue jeans was stocking the shelves when we entered. Unless I say otherwise, everybody I mention in Asia was Asian. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

  Candi went to the woman and in her own language asked her for directions to the Tehan Setar border.

  Smiling politely the woman asked her in English, “Why is it you wish to go to Tehan Setar?”

  Candi glanced at us then answered quickly, “We’re just tourists that got lost in your beautiful countryside.”

  The woman’s polite smile vanished. She gave Candi, then the two of us, a mean look then said, “There are no tourists that go to Tehan Setar, only western devils who come to rape our children. I will not help you. Leave my store!” She pointed at the door as though we’d forgotten where it was.

  “Hey lady,” I started, “I don’t know what…”

  “Leave now!” She screamed at us. “You are not welcome here. Get out!”

  Well, we’d worn out our welcome in there so we left. I didn’t know what the hell had gotten into her but we weren’t getting any directions.

  Out in the street, about fifty yards from our Subaru, there was a commotion going on.

  We crossed the street to our car as three guys in military fatigues, dressed like soldiers, dragged two kids, a little boy and a girl, from one of the huts toward a pick-up truck that had some other kids in the back end. The kids in the truck looked like they were chained together.

  A man and a woman were yelling curses at the soldiers.

  We got in our car and I reached under the seat and got the .38 I’d stashed there. Ron pulled his .38 out, and Candi dug her .45 out of her industrial sized hand bag she’d bought before leaving the airport in St. Louis.

  All three of us had the same thing in our heads. This looked like it was going to get ugly.

  Candi whispered over the seat to Ron and me, “They’re stealing their children to sell them in Tehan Setar. The man and woman are begging them not to.”

  Words echoed in my head, words spoken to me by a dead woman. “You must save the children,” Sherry had said to me.

  A soldier backhanded the father with the butt of a pistol, knocking him to the dirt. He was the only one of the three with a weapon in his hands. The other two were busy trying to keep control of the kids.

  The woman screamed and the same soldier punched her, knocking her from her feet.

  “We’re taking these sons-of-bitches out,” I told Ron and Candi, and drove the Subaru toward the soldiers.

  I drove slowly and turned like I was going around the disturbance. When we were directly across from the soldiers I yelled, “Hey!”

  All the soldiers simultaneously stopped and looked at me in the car. I shoved the .38 out the window and pumped three shots onto the armed soldier’s chest.

  Hell, I’d come all the way to South East Asia to do an old fashioned Los Angeles drive-by shooting.

  Ron and Candi barreled out of their car doors.

  Candi grabbed the soldier that was dragging the little girl by the hair of his head, and jerked an entire handful loose while punching him in the face with her left fist.

  The soldier staggered backward and went down on his ass.

  “Ain’t your momma never taught you how to play with girls?” Candi yelled at him, and kicked him in the teeth.

  When the other soldier saw the locomotive that was Ron Martin coming at him, he let go of the boy and tried to run. He only got three steps before Ron clubbed him in the side of the head with his ham of a fist, and knocked him sprawling face first in the dirt.

  People who had been hiding in the huts came out now.

  The soldiers were down and out but that didn’t stop the crowd of sixty or seventy people from the village from taking their revenge.

  They grabbed whatever they could get their hands on: sticks, hammers, knives, shovels, eating forks, anything and attacked the three soldiers.

  It wasn’t pretty what they did to those guys in the fatigue uniforms but I can’t say they didn’t have it coming. When the vengeful villagers were done clubbing and stabbing, those three boys looked like seasoned hamburger meat dressed in bloody rags.

  CHAPTER 33

  When that orgy of slaughter was over the woman from the General Store came to us and apologized saying, “I am so sorry for how I acted toward you. It is a terrible thing. Bandits steal our children and sell them to Tehan Setar, where wealthy westerners pay large amounts of money to be allowed to rape them. Our government will not protect us. We are alone out here.”

  I told her our names and the real reason we were in the country, and why I had to get into Tehan Setar. I’d already killed somebody here. Her knowing I intended on killing somebody else couldn’t hurt very much.

  When I was done, she told us, “I am Mai Lin Wu. I will take you to the border where there are no guards and wish you good luck. The man who killed your woman is probably one of those who do this evil to my people. If there were no buyers, there would be no reason for the bandits to take our children. They are the only thing of value that we have.”

  The crowd around the three bodies was thinning out. With their rage temporarily spent, most of the villagers had simply gone home. A few of the men were going through the bandit’s pockets and were collecting the weapons from inside the truck. Another man got the keys for the chains and was releasing the children.

  “What are you going to do with the bodies?” I asked Mai Lin, indicating what was left of the three bandits.

  She turned and said something in Thai to the man who was releasing the children. He answered her back immediately.

  Mai Lin said, “They will bury them in the jungle, return the children to their homes, then sell the truck for cash a long way from here. If the police ever find the bodies they would not care anyway. These bandits are like non-people in our country. Officially, they do not exist.”

  “That’s good,” Ron told her. “I’d hate to think we just dogged somebody important.”

  “Their kind is important,” Mai Lin told us, “Because of the misery they cause.”

  * * *

  When everyone calmed down and the bodies had been dragged away, Mai Lin locked up her store and invited us to her home to have a meal before we set out again on the road.

  I got to admit, after this morning, a home cooked lunch sounded good.

  Mai Lin’s home was virtually identical to the rest of the homes in her village, just a small hut with no electricity or running water.

  Despite this, the dwelling was clean and uncluttered, the few pieces of furniture and decorations that Mai Lin had, seemed to fit together just right to create a harmonious environment. This was one woman who definitely knew the meaning of Feng Shui.

  Feng Shui was something that Sherry told me about. I pretty much just figured it to be a load of bullshit, until I walked into this woman’s home.

  This home was small, the furnishings were few and simple, but the way everything was arranged created an overall effect that was soothing to the senses.

  This place was Feng Shui in action.

  Would I use this when I got back in East St. Louis to create a more harmonious environment in my apartment where I could go and relax?

  Fuck no!

  In East St. Louis, if you relax too much the next thing you know somebody’s shoveling dirt in your face.

  * * *

  The meal we had was very simple, a bowl of rice and some steamed vegetables. It tasted all right for what it was and made for a good snack. To tell you the truth though, I’m a meat man myself. Every time that I eat I like to know that some critter that I’m crunching up with my teeth had to die so that I could go on living.

 
I’m all for a kinder, gentler world but don’t you even dream about taking away my red meat. If I get to missing red meat too much, I might put you on the menu.

  * * *

  After lunch Mai Lin packed an overnight bag, and with her sitting in front with me and pointing the way, we headed on down the road toward the frontier border of Tehan Setar.

  CHAPTER 34

  The roads didn’t get any better with Mai Lin guiding us. If it was possible, they got worse.

  We passed people plowing in muddy fields with water buffalo. At least they looked like they were plowing to me. I couldn’t figure out anything else they’d be doing out there wading around in that crap all day.

  After driving through this farmland for about two or maybe three hours, the road veered into a tree cover and suddenly we were in the jungle.

  The farther I drove into that jungle the darker it got. The trees grew thick, and on all sides of us we could hear the calls of strange exotic birds, and the screams of animals that the three of us from the states couldn’t even come close to identifying.

  One scream came from close to the right side of the car. So close I almost swerved to the left reacting to the sound of it.

  It was answered by another one on the other side of the car but further off. Another screech answered that one then another answered that one. The animal screams called back and forth until the entire jungle seemed alive with howls and hoots and screeches.

  “What the fuck are those things?” Ron asked.

  “Just monkeys,” Mai Lin told him.

  “I’m glad they’re not tigers or some shit like that,” Candi said.

  “We do have big cats here,” Mai Lin told Candi. “But I do not worry about hearing them. By the time you would hear one of our tigers, it would be too late to stop him from eating you.”

  That was a comforting thought.

  * * *

  The jungle stretched on and I drove on that lonely, single lane road for a few more hours before night fell over us like a morticians shroud.