Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t forget anything in the room. It’s paid in advance, I think.”

  Ouksa put down his drink and Simon explained to Robert in English.

  “At your place?” Robert said.

  “Why not? The Alpha is a fleapit. It used to be called the Teo and it was a fleapit then too. You’ll like my place much better, believe me. We can play chess. Do you like chess?”

  Robert shrugged. “I do, sometimes.”

  “Splendid. Then we can play chess.” Simon’s eyes began to shine with mocking humor. Did he really enjoy these sorts of games? “I haven’t played in months. I can’t find anyone here to play against. You’d be doing me an enormous favor actually.”

  But the favor was also the other way around.

  Within a few minutes, in fact, Robert had begun to feel curiously attracted to Simon. It was not a sexual attraction, but it was certainly physical. The American’s body was relaxed and affable and confident. His elegance was simple, unaffected. It suggested a man who didn’t care what judgments he was subjected to because they couldn’t possibly be all that bad. And usually they would be flattering. It was Robert who was confused and a little blinded, and both of them knew it. Simon had acquired a fluent familiarity with his surroundings. He obviously spoke the language perfectly, and it was not by any means an easy language. At first Robert had wondered if Simon was gay and the purpose of the game all too easy to understand. But gradually his instinct told him that this was not the case; he might be bisexual, but either way the game was not sexual. It was about something else. Perhaps Simon was bored on his luscious river and he needed something, or someone, to manipulate.

  Ouksa finished off his drink and stood up.

  “Drive straight back here,” Simon said in Khmer. “I don’t want to go looking for you.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is it all right for him to go alone?” Robert asked.

  “Sure it is. Everyone knows everyone here. He won’t do anything amiss. He knows I’d find him.”

  When Ouksa had gone and the car had begun its short trip up to the Alpha, Simon filled his glass again and put fresh ice into it.

  “All the same, Robert, you should be a little careful moving around with that kind of money. It could be tempting for some people. Not for this one. But others. Two grand is a fortune here.”

  —

  They watched the slow river for a while. Someone holding a lantern at the end of a stick moved along the opposite bank, the light flickering behind reeds and trees, and you could tell that it was swollen by the rains. Near the reeds the water rustled against debris and the edge of moon lit the smooth, unctuous surface as it constantly shifted. All along its length the frogs sang at full throttle, a sinuous chorus that seemed to possess a relaxed relentlessness, and it served to calm slightly jangled nerves, the apprehension that for Robert always came with night. He let go of his glass finally and sank back against the pliant plastic chair. His skin was dry; his eyes felt keen and lucid. He wasn’t nervous at all, but he was not at his ease either. It was surprisingly easy to linger between these two states of mind.

  “It’s a damn warm night again,” Simon said. “But it’ll get hotter tomorrow. Does it bother you?”

  “I’m getting used to it.”

  “It’s cool by the river. It’s why I live here, of course. On the river, I mean.”

  Robert said he loved rivers too.

  “It’s a British and American thing,” Simon said.

  “Is it?”

  What did that mean? Robert wondered.

  Simon took out a cigar box, opened it and took one out. He left it open and asked “Smoke? They’re bergamot cheroots I get in Burma.”

  “All right. It’s been a while since I had a cheroot.”

  “Why’s that? Don’t have them in England?”

  “We have a few. I just don’t smoke them.”

  “Is that right, hombre? Well, we got more here than that. These are fine enough. Not Cuban, but they’ll do. Of course they’re not cigars.”

  Simon smiled, lit up both cheroots and closed the box. Soon the smoke had enveloped the table and the river breeze did not remove it. There was something manly and satisfying about it. The scent of bergamot, like a pot of brewed Earl Grey tea.

  Simon continued his questions, about which he was quite casual and slow, as if it was just the normal pace of his curiosity. A barang who did not talk with another barang all that frequently. One had to wonder if he was lonely up here on the river of Battambang. He didn’t seem lonely or even put out. There was something, to the contrary, smoothly oiled and implacable about him. As if he was used to questions and answers.

  “Moving on soon?” he asked Robert.

  “I guess I should be. Though honestly I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Where to?”

  Robert shrugged. “Phnom Penh—maybe.”

  “It’s an underrated city. Lots of girls there.”

  “It’s all right, I’m not going for the girls.”

  “You don’t have to be prickly with me about things like that. Visitors like you are always much more moral and decent in word than they are in deed. It’s OK. Everyone’s the same.”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “Oh, sure you thought about it. Everyone thinks about it.”

  “Even if I thought about it I wouldn’t do it.”

  Simon smiled. “You young barangs are so earnest. Wait till you’re forty.”

  “Are you forty?”

  “Damn near close. I’m trying to find a way to avoid getting there.”

  “Well, good luck with that.”

  “I wouldn’t leave it to luck. Maybe I’ll just change names.”

  “Anyone can do that.”

  “So,” Simon drawled, not looking up, “are you going to take a bus tomorrow?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You can take a boat down there too. I have a boat I use myself. I can call the guy down for you. He’ll be here any time you like.”

  “Is that the best way to go?”

  “Sure it is. Relax, take the sun on the deck. And all that.”

  “All right then. Maybe I will.”

  “You do say maybe a lot, Robert. Life is not maybe.”

  “All right, I will take the boat.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Do you have business there?”

  “I’m on holiday.”

  “Ah yes. Holidays. I forgot about them.”

  They smiled. Simon eyed him carefully over the edge of his glass.

  “I say we have three chess games. Best of three. All right with you?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s the spirit. You know, Robert, you seem like a sport. When I saw you at the temple earlier I thought, He’s a sport, you can tell from his body language. Well, that’s what I say. You can tell a man’s a sport from his body language. And from his shoes of course. I gave you a pass on the shoes. But overall I think I was right. You wouldn’t believe many of the people who come through here. Pure Flintstones. I don’t look down at them but it’s how I feel. One can’t help it. It’s like they come here to die and they aren’t sports about it either. They do it as if they’re too lazy to do it properly. In fact a lot of them do. They throw themselves in the river. Three or four bodies wash up every week, barangs down on their luck and tanked up with Yaa Baa. It’s a cottage industry for the crematoria at the monasteries. I never can figure out who pays for the funerals.”

  Simon looked out across the waters, momentarily distracted, and picked a shred of tobacco from his lip.

  “Well, I pay for some of them, if you want to know. I have the money. I don’t care. It seems a damned shame to let some kid go uncremated because no one came in to claim the body.”

  “Then you are a sport too.”

  “It’s nice of you to say. I think of myself as the guardian of this part of the river. I watch over it, you see.”
/>
  They mixed the Royal Stag with soda now and made it very cold.

  “You’re lucky you can live like this,” Robert said. “You must have a business here.”

  “I had the money when I moved here.”

  That’s luck, Robert thought. The lucky have great timing.

  “Back in the days when the dollar was high,” Simon went on, swirling his ice. “Back when we were rich. It’s a rather different story now, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll say.”

  “But you came into a bit of cash.”

  “I didn’t think I’d win it in a casino.”

  “It’s a sign. The Khmers believe in signs. Every sign means something. When my housekeeper told me about it I laughed and I thought, There’s a sign if I’ve ever heard of one.”

  “Your housekeeper?”

  “News travels on gossamer wings. She told me and we agreed it was a real sign.”

  “Of what?”

  “Who knows—one never knows. That we would meet tonight? That we would play chess? You have to think in the Khmer way.”

  They were laughing and Simon was thinking how much more elegant Robert would look with a proper pair of shoes. He was a good-looking boy all the same, a boy with swing and lilt and charm. The English farmlands in his cream complexion and open skies in the eyes. It was a charm that survived all changes in locale, one felt it quickly and it was not something one could walk back from. But his English solidity let him down. He was still harnessed to another way of life, you could see the cowed look in his eyes.

  Robert, for his part, had begun to give in to this charm offensive even as his mind kept returning to that grisly image of bodies floating down the river. He congratulated himself on ignoring Ouksa’s advice. Simon, he reasoned, was not understandable to a Khmer boy with no experience of the wider world. He was an oddity even in the Western context. To Robert, in those slightly giddy moments, he suggested a man of another age, an anachronism that was appealing for all the affectation it implied. There was a subtle menace about him, but it never quite broke into open view.

  —

  Robert pushed a hand through his loose, foppish blond hair and the moths buzzed around his head. The car was returning and Ouksa was driving it with paranoid slowness as the tires slipped in the wet gravel. Simon smoked his cigar down and they waited for Ouksa to come back into the bar with his sheepish look and his acute suspicion. When he had done so they all rose and went to the car in a jovial mood and the owner emerged and told them not to worry about the bill. They came out into a faint moonlight and the glimmer of open sky and the bushes seemed alive with moths. They followed Simon’s taillight as he turned left from the bar and followed the river-hugging road past the last small villas and family houses and into the somber, purring open countryside and its dark palm-shaped silhouettes.

  Here there was a network of unsurfaced roads that had no lights. Beaucamp’s house seemed to be the very last one of all, and was half a mile from the nearest neighbor, its back garden sloping right down to the river where there was a small private jetty. It was surrounded by a low gray wall and had two gray gateposts and a rusting iron gate. The garden was startlingly lush and wildly overgrown, with black ceramic amphorae standing about in the uncut grass and a hammock between two cotton trees. It was a simple concrete villa raised above the ground in the Khmer-village style by posts. But he had turned this ground-floor area into a kind of veranda which projected out to the water’s edge and was filled with sofas and carpets and low coffee tables. It was an original arrangement, artfully disheveled in the way that a superb dresser will be. The ceiling had four propeller fans and there was a drinks cabinet in one corner nicely protected from the elements.

  Ouksa carried his bag to the door and Simon told him gently in Khmer that his duties for the day were at an end and he could leave.

  “He looks relieved,” Simon said to Robert with a merry eye. “Can’t wait to be rid of us.”

  But Robert walked Ouksa back to the car.

  “This bad man,” Ouksa said in a low voice. “Dun you stay here.”

  “He’s just a little odd—don’t worry. He’s American—I understand him. I’ll be fine.”

  He slipped Ouksa the extra twenty dollars.

  “Thank you. This man not what he look.”

  The thought had gone through Robert’s mind several times by now but it had not been enough to deter him. He was not sure why. It was an open question whether it was the very thing that he was attracted to.

  When Ouksa had driven off, the two white men sat on the veranda with gin and tonics. The open rafters of the house seemed immense in the night shadows, the moths spinning around the wooden beams. It looked like a house which Simon had built himself since it was so much better-looking than the houses he had seen up till then. Simon put on some music from the house above them. He took out his ornate Moroccan chessboard, with its pieces carved from argun wood and hand-painted, and they set it up on the coffee table between them. He said he had bought it long ago in Essaouria on the Atlantic coast and it had a “spirit” that helped his game. He laid out the pieces and they flipped for black and white and Robert got black. He kicked off his sandals and the alcohol swelled within him and he absorbed the humid smell of datura coming in from the forest. The roneat music was faintly chiming out in the pitch-black fields, a wailing of fiddles as well. Simon made the first move and soon he was winning easily. He was the kind of player who had all his moves prepared in his head long before he touched a single pawn.

  FIVE

  Slowly, the whole sky visible above the bend in the river began to empty of clouds. It filled with a soft light that gradually made the sugar palms on the far bank more distinct and the piles of the jetty sharp and clear. The sweetness of this ripening night sky made Robert not care what time it had become. Birds sang in the forest, looping sing-song calls like those of macaws, and a million falling waterdrops merged together into a single sound. It was strange how trees kept dripping long after the rain had stopped. A country like a waterwheel, like a mass of wind chimes.

  The second game had begun but it was slower in pace than the first one. More cheroots, lit with a certain ceremony.

  There were feet on the steps, a pair of bare ankles appeared. They paused and Simon engaged his eye and smiled and put a finger against his lips. The girlfriend came down in a bathrobe, a slender Khmer yawning, and when she was at the bottom of the steps she turned and looked at them and said nothing, just walked over to the drinks cabinet and poured herself a tonic water.

  “Sothea,” Simon said, “this is our new friend Robert, all the way from England. He’s a little deaf so you’ll have to speak up.”

  She was dark and long-haired and oiled, and she looked from one man to the other and back again and said nothing at all. Simon said to her in Khmer, “You can go back to sleep if you want. We’re playing chess.”

  “I can see what you’re doing,” she said.

  She came over with her feet faintly oiled and smiled for Robert and he saw that her hair was wet. Her long fingers grasped the glass of tonic water with an awkward uncertainty, as if she were already resigned to the idea of dropping it and watching it smash.

  “Sues’day,” she said, and nothing more.

  “Are you hungry?” Simon said to Robert. “We can eat satay if you want.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  She went back up the stairs and soon there was a smell of cooking and they played the second game while the frogs seemed to come closer in the undergrowth. The moon became very still. The girl returned with a plate of pork satay on sticks and a little dipping sauce. She sat at the edge of Simon’s chair and watched his hands move his pieces back and forth. One could see the easy familiarity, the sexual tenderness between them. Simon began to dominate the board just as he had before and yet he seemed reluctant to win the game too quickly. He wanted to know about Robert.

  “You don’t seem like a schoolteacher.”

  “What do they
seem like?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I only know American ones. They seem—depressed. It’s sort of a dead-end career, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know if I’d say that.”

  “Well, obviously you wouldn’t. But that doesn’t make it untrue.”

  “It doesn’t make it true either.”

  Robert talked about his last two years. There was something false about it, a slight artificiality in his voice as he complained about his town and his job and his solitude.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Simon said suddenly.

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re going to have a difficult time in this country then. You cannot be here and not believe in ghosts. Say, Sothea honey—do you believe in ghosts?”

  Gravely, she stared at him and her mouth opened.

  “See? They all believe in ghosts. Ghosts are more real to them than you and I are. That means ghosts are more important to them than we are. I like that view of the world myself. It seems serious.”

  “Does she really believe in them?”

  “It’s categorical. I’m a Yale man myself. Highly reasonable. But don’t hold it against me, because she doesn’t. And I believe in ghosts just as much as she does. I’ve come around to the idea. I prefer the idea. It goes against everything I was raised with.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  “Let’s drink to ghosts—”

  The girl got up brusquely and walked out into the garden, where her hair shone and her cool distaste was removed from them. It was a disreputable thing to make a toast to but Robert had the sense that Simon had done it on purpose.

  “There are many ghosts along the river, hombre. Quite a few. I don’t see them but she does. She has a knack of seeing them. I used to say, Oh, it’s a Khmer thing, and it was a bit patronizing, but now I wonder. I wonder if she’s just got a flair for it. A nose.”

  Along that river a longtail now moved, a lamp hung from its rear end, the motor purring quietly. They got a little drunk. The girl went back upstairs and Robert lost the game and they sat for a while under the careering moths and the oil lamp hung on a black wire.