“Really?” I asked. “But you just said when we were walking up here that it sucks. Weren’t you so bored in camp that you just did drugs all the time?” This was a rhetorical question. He’d already told me that he’d freebased meth for years. He would sneak out of camp with a friend and go to a nearby Mon village and buy some pills. In Huay Kaloke, they cost more than a dollar each. In Umpiem, they were half as much, because they were actually made in the village that sold them, Htan Dah thought. He and his friend would wait in the front room of the dealer’s place while someone went to get the goods—in the back of the house, outside, at another house, they couldn’t see where. Htan Dah used the money his mom earned illegally doing labor, which she gave him to buy food, so he would have more variety than his rations afforded him in his diet. Twice a week he and his friends would close themselves in one of the communal bamboo bathroom stalls with a lighter and a crushed pill and a piece of foil. A lot of refugees liked it because it gave them energy against all the odds, Htan Dah said. Personally, he didn’t really like the way it made him feel, unable to sleep or eat, but oh, my god, was he bored,63 and he did like the ceremony, the way it made him seem to belong to something, part of a community, and the smell of it, and the fact that it was one interesting thing in his life. He also found it helpful for prolonging drinking binges. But then he “lost control” and sold his watch, the only valuable object he ever owned, an addiction cliché that apparently knows no international borders. Eventually, he quit, cold turkey, because he was afraid he’d get arrested, or sick. Eh Soe had shown me a picture of Htan Dah from that time, and he was so gaunt I couldn’t recognize him. (“Who’s this?” “It’s Htan Dah!” “What’s the matter with his face?” “That’s when he was doing drugs.”)
Htan Dah shrugged. “Yes, but here we can play guitar, and laugh, without . . . police, and worrying.”
We watched a little girl, who looked like she was about five, walk down the path below the elevated porch. She navigated the steep, choppy mud in pink gum boots and a purple dress, miraculously retaining her balance with a giant bucket of water in her arms and no traction on her feet.
“Okay,” I said. “So why don’t you move back to camp?”
“Because. In camp, I cannot work. I cannot work for my people. Just, sitting, and talking, and eating, and sleeping—it accomplishes nothing.”
We debated staying for dinner, and staying the night, but Abby wasn’t wild about the prospect. “Also,” Htan Dah said, “we have this pork.” Someone had slaughtered a pig and cleaved off a giant hunk as a gift to Htan Dah. He’d finished the training he’d come for, and he was anxious to get the pork back to BA, where there was electricity and a refrigerator. Currently, it was sitting on the porch in a garbage bag, as it had been for some time.
So we three and the pork bag hopped a songthaew toward Mae Sot. Abby went down hard in the mud as we climbed aboard with a full load of passengers. The driver got into the front seat, then got out again, and came around to rescue Abby or me from the Asian riffraff packing the back. I took him up on the shotgun offer in the name of my nausea. Htan Dah stood on the back bumper and held on to the arch rail for the whole wretchedly winding road back.
At Office One, Htan Dah’s pork in the fridge and his email checked, in the still twilight, after work and before whiskey, I sat in my room writing things down. The house was as quiet as a refugee camp.
“What are you doing?” Htan Dah asked. He walked through my doorway slowly, long seconds between his steps, always so tentative in interrupting.
“Nothing,” I said. I put my pen down. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay,” I said, laughing. “Let’s go to a bar.”
“Okay.”
My eyes widened. “Really? Wait, seriously?”
Htan Dah nodded, one hard chin dip. “Sure. Why not?”
Debilitating fear of police? Irrational terror of stray dogs? Deportment for everyone? “No reason!” I said. “Can we walk?”
So it was that we walked out of the driveway and down the street and toward downtown. We cut through the temple grounds, with the Buddhas long- and slim-faced, strung white lights twinkling in the air around the stupa. Though I’d been in Mae Sot five weeks, I’d never walked all the way into town after dusk. In the darkness, the streets were still warm and wet. Tuk-tuks and cars and motorbikes crowded them as usual, and the storefronts were still cramped. “Have you never been to a bar before, ever?” I asked Htan Dah.
“No! Never! I—”
“Yes, I know, you’re a refugee. I was just asking.”
The Crocodile Tear sat in a row of guesthouses and restaurants for tourists. The bar itself evidently pandered to both NGO workers and wealthy Thai businessmen interested in simulating the experience of getting hammered in Middle America. Our menu boasted cocktails with names like Billabong, featuring ingredients that didn’t exist in Thailand at large, triple sec and curaçao of multiple colors. A band onstage was covering “Paint It Black” in very questionable English.
“I used to get drunk and dance around like a jackass to this song in college,” I said, watching the bloated, flushed Thai men singing along at the table next to us.
“I think they are very happy,” Htan Dah said. He took in our surroundings without turning his head much, as discreetly as possible. Wood walls, wood tables. Bottles of booze lined up behind a short wood bar in the back corner, where the girls in tight T-shirts filled drink orders. Fat guys singing Rolling Stones. Oh, nope. Now they were moving on to “Brown-Eyed Girl.”
“What do you want to drink?” I asked Htan Dah.
“I don’t know!” In ascending notes. “I don’t know what to drink! I don’t know what I’m doing. What do you think?”
“Well, generally, I drink a lot of vodka. Have you ever had vodka?”
“No. But I would like to try.”
“Okay. We should celebrate. Have you ever done a shot?”
“No!” he exclaimed, enthusiastically even for him. He smiled broadly, like he was the luckiest son of a bitch living. “I have never been shot!”
I laughed hard, though that probably wasn’t funny. I ordered two shots of vodka and a pack of Marlboros and explained that we were going to throw back the little glasses the girl in the little shirt brought us. Htan Dah watched me grip my shot glass lightly, my thumb and two forefingers on either side of its middle. He did the same, and followed me as well when I picked it up and held it out toward him.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Here’s to getting into J-school.” Htan Dah nodded another hard nod.
I clinked the lip of my glass into his and looked at him square. “Down in one. Ready?”
We ordered a round of tequila shots, since he’d never had tequila before. He liked that better than vodka, so we had another round of those. He’d never ordered and been served food out before, despite his living so close to all these sit-down establishments for so long, so we got plates of hot red curry and steaming rice. We shot more booze and played Who Would You Rather? using the big table of tourist girls behind us. I picked the prettier one every time. Invariably, he chose as his theoretical lover whichever of the choices looked more “flexible”—as in adaptable or easygoing, not as in doing the splits. We hollered at each other over the band, whose set Htan Dah knew as well as I did. We smoked cigarettes and sang along with a sweet mix of oldies and classic and soft rock. As Long as You Love Me. House of the Rising Sun. Take Me to Your Heart—product of Danish boy band Michael Learns to Rock, which, an escaped Chinese-immigrant porter swore to Htoo Moo, didn’t write it but just translated it into English after stealing it from Cantopop star Jacky “God of Songs” Cheung.64 Feel Like Makin’ Love. Love Will Keep Us Alive. People Are Strange. The Boxer. More Than Words. Lola. Horse With No Name. Sundown.
“Gordon Lightfoot!?” someone screamed.
Okay; it was me.
Hours later, a door or two or three down from the Crocodile Tear, the Thai proprieto
r of a very dark bar looked at me like I had lost my mind when I leaned into the counter and asked him for a room. Though I had no doubt that this craphole was patronized nearly exclusively by people of significantly lower character than myself, and he did ultimately consent, he hesitated long to sell me a vacancy. He seemed suspicious of my slurring, or of the Karen refugee standing behind me, hair long and thick with camp’s cook smoke. Possibly both.
Htan Dah and I walked down a narrow sidewalk out the back, following it to our room, where I slid the key into the door. An awful neon light flickered on when I flipped the switch. It was an airless, windowless cell with hardly the room for the queen-size bed. We left our flip-flops at the door and narrowly skirted the mattress, Htan Dah following me into the bathroom. “Here,” I said, pointing. I set the dial to max on the small, electric on-demand water heater attached to the showerhead. I turned the water on and held my hand in the stream. After a moment, it warmed up. “See?”
“Ah, okay,” he said, touching it. “I see I see I see.”
I dropped down on the rock-hard mattress and heard the bathroom door close, then the slight, rustling sounds of disrobing as my brain spun around where I lay still on a pillow. Then there was the splash of water dropping weakly to the floor, echoing around the bathroom tile, the tinkling puncturing the throbbing static building in my ear-drums, the music from the bar pumping a hard bass that vibrated in my chest but I barely heard as my head swam away from sentience.
DAWN IN downtown Mae Sot was hollow.
Htan Dah and I opened our room door onto gray, lonely streets. We wound our way back home through the slight chill, past muted steel-pot clangings of preparing street vendors who moved quick but not hurriedly, the smell of the beginnings of humidity and char. My forehead pounded something fierce, and I squinted against even the ashen light.
“I kind of feel like I’m doing a walk of shame,” I said.
Htan Dah looked at me with expectant confusion, waiting for me to explain.
“It’s when you walk home by yourself after partying too hard and sleeping somewhere you shouldn’t have. Like, you smell bad, and you’re hungover, and tired, and look like shit, and it’s too early to be on the street.”
Htan Dah nodded thoughtfully. “So,” he said solemnly, after a moment. “This is my first walk of shame.”
I tipped my aching head back, opening my mouth and throat up to laughter. “Well, no. I’m pretty sure you have to have sex to have a walk of shame. And you’re supposed to be, like, carrying your underwear in your pocket.”
It was Saturday, the Saturday before the Tuesday I was leaving, which meant that that night was the night of the long-awaited and emphatically promised party I was to throw at Office Two. The sky was warmer and oranger by the time Htan Dah and I somewhat staggered back into our house, and my exhaustion and nausea had advanced to the point where I was daunted by even what little I had to do before the sun set again: prepare for more drinking, mainly. Also, procure enough food and booze to satisfy a houseful of twenty-year-old men expecting to party their faces off. Also, as I’d invited Htan Dah as my ride and escort, help fulfill his dinner duties for Office One before we left. Which was what we were doing, later, when Ta Mla burst into the dining room/garage, angrier than I’d ever seen him, gesturing agitatedly and spewing a storm of pissed-off Karen.
“I hate them!” he exploded after an extended tirade in his first language. He looked at me and explained in shaking and broken English that a cop standing by the side of the road had waved him over as Ta Mla rode past on his bicycle. He’d just been going out for some exercise, and he’d even bought one of the yellow fabric “We Love the King” wristbands after the last time he’d been arrested, in an effort to better blend in with the Thais. No dice.
“That policeman,” Ta Mla seethed, grasping his stomach, “he knows me very well.” Indeed he did; it was the same guy who’d arrested him two weeks before. This time, Ta Mla had been cashless and alone, and the officer had, whether out of cruelty, or boredom, or both, made him sit handcuffed on the curb when Ta Mla couldn’t produce the papers the cop knew he didn’t have. He let Ta Mla sweat it out there for an hour or so before allowing him to call a coworker who could bring the $5 bribe that would set him free. And Ta Mla, sweet, subtle, terrorist-boot-camp-dropout Ta Mla, swore now, in the dining room/ garage, “If I had a hand grenade, I would explode him.”
Htan Dah had paused his chili-paste pounding to watch Ta Mla, the marble pestle impotent in his hand while he listened to him. When Ta Mla finally stalked off into the house, Htan Dah went back to gently slamming the tool into the mortar, his head bent low over his task, his hair hanging toward the table.
After a minute, he started chuckling.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He looked up, smiling. “Ta Mla is so mad,” he said, chuckling some more.
I shook my head. Just the hollering had made my heart beat faster and my stomach clench. “Did he say who brought him the money?”
“Yes, it was Walt. You know, Walt was arrested today, too. Earlier than Ta Mla. He had to pay Thai police twice today.”
Walt had briefly been a student in my advanced class, but his duties in the organization and at Office Two had soon necessitated his attrition. I liked Walt, and not just because he went by an easy-to-pronounce nickname and had issued a hearty “Hello!” that brought me nearly to relieved tears on one of my first days, when most everyone else was ignoring me and their own English abilities. He had a lanky, self-conscious shuffle. He loved math and listened to English self-study CDs. When he’d read aloud his writing exercise in class one day, it had been about how he worried that he’d never find a girlfriend because he was ugly.
“Hey, pal,” I said when I encountered his big, shy smile at Office Two later that night. “I heard you had an exciting day.” Htan Dah and I had come bearing heavy plastic bags on our fingers, the favors we’d hustled around town accumulating after Office One had been fed. Walt stood chatting with me, with his head tipped and shoulders stooped, in the way of a person who isn’t comfortable in his height, while Htan Dah and I opened our bags and unleashed a mighty party spread on the floor.
“Yes,” Walt said. He laughed. “Very busy today.”
“How come you got away so easily, when Ta Mla needed you to rescue him?”
“Ta Mla doesn’t speak Thai. Me, I speak some Thai, so I just talked to the policeman, very calm.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Hey, friend, why don’t you go buy yourself some whiskey?’ I just hand him five hundred baht. And he just”—Walt waved the back of his hand, as if he were swatting a fly away from his face—“let me go.”
“Wow, Walt. You offered him money before he even asked you for it?”
Htan Dah laughed. “Walt is very smooth talker.”
Walt laughed again, too, his giant teeth gleaming at us. You’d never guess, looking at him, talking to him, that he used to be a dedicated warmonger.
WALT WAS born a soldier, of a soldier. He’d lived in a KNU base camp until it was attacked, when he was five, and his mother took him to Huay Kaloke. They moved to another camp, Maw Ker, before Huay Kaloke was burned down, though ultimately that camp was burned down, too. When he was ten, his father was killed in battle. When he was sixteen, he enlisted.65 By then, Walt had seen a lot of fighting and fleeing, and he wanted revenge.
By the time Walt was out of boot camp and stalking the jungle with an AK-47, Manerplaw had fallen, Four Cuts had ravaged thousands of villages, the DKBA had robbed the KNU of much of its land and border-tax income, and the rebel fighters were tired, their numbers and munitions depleted. They sometimes supplemented their ammunition with homemade gunpowder: bat shit plus mango-wood charcoal plus sulfur. But Walt didn’t need ample supplies and backup to love being at war; he had plenty of anger to fuel him through two years of long, jungle-tramping days, little food, and little assurance that shooting at his enemies through the trees was making any differe
nce.
When he was eighteen, his brigade fell. When his commander bailed and the rations ran out, he moved to Bangkok with seven other soldiers. They worked as housepainters on a six-month contract, living in a tin shed they’d built out of scrap. The illegal immigrants were supposed to be paid when the contract was up. They weren’t. “It’s better to die than become a slave,” Walt told his comrades, and with that, he rejoined the Karen guerrillas, the fourth brigade, which eventually became better known to the world as God’s Army.66
For two months in the late ’90s, Walt continued fighting in the jungle, alongside Jesus-loving kids with assault weapons. When he went to visit family in a refugee camp at age nineteen, his uncle was a little concerned for Walt’s future. Learn first, he told him. Then decide if you still want to fight after that. So Walt moved into camp, finished high school, and quit his military career for good.67
He’d joined BA as a village organizer, he said, so he could fight for freedom, justice, and peace—the same nonviolent ideals for which he’d previously been fighting, only violently. Unlike his coworkers, who hadn’t actually been to war, Walt’s hero wasn’t Che, but Gandhi. He’d said to me in all earnestness once that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. And he aspired to his icon’s stamina. “Wars are between armies,” he’d told me when I asked him if he was thinking of resettling. “What about all the people in between? People can change the situation on the ground. Don’t forget the people. Get them involved in the resistance. I think I can do many things here. If I resettle, I will start my life again. I’ll think about myself there, not my people, which is what I need to do. If you have a family, they come first. But I want to get married, and my children can take on responsibility to fight. I’ll still fight, too. When I get old, I’ll be teacher or trainer or writer. Even if I get married, I won’t give up.”
Walt sat next to me when everyone settled in a circle around the party goods in the middle of the Office Two floor. Htan Dah and I presided over the display proudly, our backs straight as we sat Indian-style while the guests surveyed what we had brought. Roti from the joint across from the mosque, stuffed with meat and vegetables. Bags of potato chips, which my coworkers for some reason considered an estimable treat. Thai noodles and curries in street vendors’ plastic bags. Enough Chang beer to kill a man. Ice. Two bottles of hard-found, “charcoal filtered,” “imported from Kentucky” vodka that cost nearly as much as everything else combined. Orange juice—also a rare and expensive commodity—because the boys wanted to try a screwdriver like a white person might order out, and because only a fool, or an addict, would drink this low-quality vodka straight.
For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Page 27