“It’s better not to have one in this town. It’ll get you into trouble. You should leave it at home every night from now on.”
“All right, I’ll take your advice.”
Her foot had crossed over to his side and touched his. They were slipping downward and the Chinese screens around them blurred in his vision. An hour later they were in a tuk-tuk to Pontoon, a fresh and bright rain falling all around them.
Outside the club was a small crowd of Khmer drivers. They pushed their way to the doors and the bouncers nodded them through after glancing at Sophal’s ID. At the end of a dark corridor lay an immense horseshoe bar with sofas around it. They danced for a while, Sophal raising and lowering her arms with her fingers extended in the positions of classical Khmer dance, and then they sat at the bar among the punters and the girls on the make and the waify NGO men who moralized by day and picked up girls by night. She ordered a bottle of white rum and they drank that with huge pieces of ice and Coke and watched the aid workers and diplomat staffers from India and Africa and Europe elided into a great pleasure-seeking confusion which the Khmer girls preyed on with a nimble awareness of the smallest advantage and disadvantage. It was amusing for an hour. But without a watch, he reflected, there was no way of knowing how long it was amusing for. When they came back onto the street, in any case, it felt much later. The streets had gone into that delicious comatose state of the late nights, the pavements given over to noodles and fried squid and cats, the tuk-tuks moving through the rain more silently. The desultory, lazy atmosphere of sex and loose ends and straying curiosity. There was no violence in the air at all, just a rambling sense of restlessness and anticipation. Soon, later still, the street people would come out of the shadows, the scavengers and sweeps and drifters who sifted through the city’s rubbish and detritus in the hours before dawn, but they too had a listless gentleness.
He offered to walk her home to her parents’ house and as they walked along the boulevards the lights went out again and the roads filled with their indolent floods. They came to the gates and she said, “We could go to Colonial Mansions instead—for a bit. I’ll tell Daddy we couldn’t find a driver with the blackout.”
Robert went along with it and they went back down to the boulevard and found a tuk-tuk who could be reasoned with. The lightning now came down in clearly visible forks but as yet there was no sound, no audible threat.
In his room they took off their clothes solemnly although there was no light to be had and no fan or cooler. He ran a cold bath and they lay in it for a long time. She had gone into his miserable kitchen and found some coffee grounds and mixed them with milk and brought the paste back into the bathroom. As they lay in the cool water listening to the rain she rubbed the coarse grains into his back, his shoulders and his arms, then his hands and fingers, filling every crevice of him with the mixture. Then she told him to do the same with her. He scooped the paste into both hands and then spread it across her back making it dark, then her tiny arms and the back of her neck. When they were both coffee-dark and grainy they lay back in the water and smelled the coffee and the milk and the rising sweat mixed together. The rain had reached a furious crescendo and hammered now on the half-open windows and the roof garden above them. They went to the bed only half washed off, still reeking like a coffeepot, and lay down in the damp sheets and kissed until they fell asleep for a while.
Even when they woke they were not entirely in the world. The rain had stopped and a vast, anvil-shaped cloud had taken form above the city. At its center, emerging hour by hour and with a ghostly uncertainty, a new moon finally forced its way into the picture. A halo surrounded it, a perfect circumference of surrounding atmospheric light. The cloud evolved around it also, frothy edges glowing with silver brightness. Inexorable and silent, it ballooned upward like a sign of terrestrial war, its black core unaffected by the moon. Watching its outer edge progress into space, the observer felt a subtle madness. Far down the river, in fact, on the banks of the Mekong, the men who worked on the river looked up and made predictions. Some said it was a sign of good things to come, an omen that could be trusted, but by far the majority sensed that it foretold something evil and unknown. They said it was a cloud of dogs and vultures.
Dogs and Vultures
TWELVE
In a dying hotel called the Tamarind Tree, Simon and Sothea also slept together in a fifteen-dollar room. It was a small and unremarkable settlement on the river and there was a temple on the far side of the motionless water with a gold-leaf stupa and a radio tower that cast its shadow over a pond filled with decayed hyacinth. They had seen it for a moment before night fell, a vision of bright modernized faith. Through the air fell delicate snowlike ash from a plant of some kind, a crematorium Sothea had said when they arrived, though he knew it must have been a kiln. Across the street stood an office of the Sam Rainy Party, where no one had been seen that day, and the padlocked shophouses had not been opened after their arrival. The little town seemed to have fallen into a sleep, though cats sat erect and sarcastic under the yellow flamboyants. The sun sliced across it and failed to rouse any life. Only the birds screamed.
When Simon woke he heard koel birds whooping in disheveled backyards and the half-abandoned park that lay against the river. He raised his hand to his eyes to block out the light. Where were they? He wrapped a towel around his middle and stumbled out onto a cement balcony, where a laundry line held their drying underwear and Sothea’s last good miniskirt. The owner of the hotel was in the mud yard below making tea with a hot plate, and a swarm of tanagers had come to pick off the pieces of bread that lay scattered around her. The woman looked up for a moment with amicable hostility. What did one say to such men first thing in the morning? A simple “Get lost” wouldn’t quite do. She smiled instead, and muttered the usual “Sous’dey” and her guest stepped back with his eyes squinting, as if still stoned from the night before.
He looked over the wall of the hotel into the street and saw the trees still wet from the rain and tractors dragging loads down it. He couldn’t even remember the name of the place—they had arrived in the middle of the night and taken their dope within an hour. They must have passed out before midnight and gone into an impenetrable enraged sleep. His eyes felt dry and his mouth had emptied of saliva. What day was it? Beyond the town there were mountains, green jade hills that he knew. Smoke rose in wisps from fires set in those hills, and he remembered those fires as well. They had seen them the previous day between the rains. His hand shook, a small vibration rather, and he went down to the ground floor in a cold fury to see if he could scrounge some coffee or, a worse option, venture into the street and buy some. The owner offered him tea and told him that they had Nescafé if he wanted to take that up to his girlfriend.
He woke Sothea with the Nescafé mixed with sugar and milk and they played some music for a while and made love in the glow of the thin orange curtains.
“Why are we here?” she kept saying. “What happened?”
“You don’t remember, baby? We got high after we arrived. We drove in our new car all the way.”
“Oh, the car,” she sighed.
“We still have the car. It’s down in the street.”
“Coffee is good.”
“I made it sweet like you like it.”
“It tastes like arabica.”
He laughed. “It’s Nescafé with Carnation.”
She was still half dressed in yesterday’s clothes, as he was, and after the shared coffee they took a cold shower while the radio played. Sothea then stepped out onto the balcony and recovered her miniskirt and dressed herself studiously in front of the bathroom mirror. She remembered nothing at all of the previous twenty-four hours. She thought Simon would remember it for her. If anything needed remembering, Simon remembered it.
While she did this, he packed their shared suitcase by simply throwing all the bits and pieces into it and placing the needles and junk at the bottom and the clothes on top of them. It was an inept concealmen
t but it was instinct by now. They could wait until after lunch before taking a hit, or they could skip lunch and go into the forest when the heat came and get their juice. In the end, it would probably be neither. They went down at checkout time and threw the bag into the trunk of the car with the money and strolled down the lone main street to get some lok-lok and beers. The soil had dried so much that the constant wind kicked up a fine dust. They sat at a metal table in their heavy shades and ate morosely, trying to clear their heads and feel human again. Gradually everything came back to normal. They had taken off without much planning and now they still had no plan. Simon thought about making a run for the border and going into Thailand for a while. He had friends here and there, and they could score some nice stuff in Bangkok while living free. But soon he turned away from the idea. The border was always tricky. He didn’t know if the English boy had panicked and gone to the police. They wouldn’t care, but they might figure there was a bribe in it for them if they caught him at the border and made things unpleasant for him. They were malicious enough to do that. Instead, then, he thought of a place he knew in the mountains where he’d been before to lie low. It was a lodge owned by a Scot who used to be a British soldier. It lay up among the minefields in the Cardamoms, on a track that was hard to find. He was sure he could find it.
“I’ve got just the place,” he said to Sothea. “You’re going to love it.”
“Hotel with swimming pool?”
“Not exactly, honey. But we have to lie low for a few days.”
“Low?”
“Yes, we have to be very quiet.”
She sulked while he paid the bill and they walked back to the car. It was an old secondhand Saber and it was on its last legs.
They drove out of the town into the bright hayfields where the old field guns lay on their sides like toys. Soon they were on the road to Pailin, but they were not going to go there. They took a turnoff and plowed into low, rolling hills dotted with manilkara. They swept into a desolate village and stopped for a cold Coke at a tiny, swarming market. Thousands of flies descended upon them and they stood helplessly in the sunlight while cripples with blown-off legs, land mine victims, closed in upon them as well with an unerring instinct for barang money. “I don’t have anything,” he snapped at them in Khmer and they backed off a little, incredulous, before regaining their courage. Sothea swore at them and there was a stalemate. They went back into the car and drove on, up a long, wooded hill until the road divided and the left fork was a dirt track snaking between thorn trees. They took it.
“I remember the way,” he said, to reassure her. “Don’t worry, you’ll like it. It’s got a tree house. And a river.”
“I don’t care no river.”
“All the same…”
She thought he looked a little crazy in the English boy’s clothes. They didn’t suit him, and they didn’t even fit him, and he turned overnight from an elegant entrepreneur to a hippie on the run. He told her it was useful to change identities since he had stolen a lot of money and then he told her impatiently not to ask any more about it. She sensed at once that he was running away from a lot more than that. Whom, then, had he double-crossed? He must have double-crossed someone far more formidable than that English boy, but he wouldn’t say. He didn’t want to worry her. Now, however, he seemed agitated and lost and his temper was flaring. They bumped along the narrower track and soon they were rising steeply through fields bordered by yellow UN tape with signs warning not to walk across them.
There were little wood bridges with boys in kramas with weapons in their laps waiting to skin a wristwatch or a few dollars, and when they saw the Saber with the barang they perked up, stood and hoisted the weapons onto their shoulders and came into the sun squinting. It was two dollars a crossing. They had a famished, hollow look. They stared at the Khmer girl in the passenger seat and there was a tense unease in the standoffish attempts at humor on the part of the American. In reality he was alarmed. He drove through quickly and up into slopes of burned grass and then a forest like England, the trees tall and willowy and silent in the hot sun. The track climbed up past lonely houses on stilts, their mud yards carefully swept, past Vietnamese tanks stuck for eternity at the edge of ravines of wildflowers. The car pitched left and right and Sothea held onto the overhead strap with a grim annoyance. At the edge of a larger, denser forest they came to another roadblock, this one manned by a policeman.
It was now midday. The cop was reading a paper in a deck chair under the shade of a monkeypod and, lowering the paper, he looked up with a calm, cynical clairvoyance as the ancient car rattled its way toward his two-lane bridge. He stood, like the others, and sauntered out into the heat and held up his hand. His two men were off on an errand and he was alone for an hour—all the more reason to assert himself with a certain amount of firmness. He stepped in front of the Saber and brought it to a halt and, without smiling, induced Simon’s face to protrude through the opened window.
Davuth Vichea spoke enough English to wring a modest profit from a passing foreigner, and he knew enough to do it unobtrusively.
“Good morning,” he said, and dipped his head to catch sight of the Khmer girl in the seat next to the barang. So that was an inconvenience. “Where are you going?” he said in Khmer to Sothea.
But it was Simon who answered in that same language.
“We’re going to a lodge up the mountain.”
“You speak Khmer?”
Simon smiled and that was enough.
“What is that place called?” Davuth asked.
“It’s called Moonrise Lodge.”
“The Scot?”
“The Scot is my friend.”
“Ah, so the Scot is your friend.” The policeman rocked back on his heels and laughed. “His name is Michael, na?”
“Micky, yes.”
“Yes, Ta Mick. A dangerous man!”
“He’s a little odd.”
“And he is your friend?”
“Yes. Did you know—he has a piece of shrapnel lodged in his head?”
“A piece of shrapnel?”
“Yes, a piece of shrapnel. It is why—”
Davuth rubbed his chin. “I did not know that Ta Mick had a piece of shrapnel in his head.”
“In his frontal lobes, na. It is a war wound.”
“A piece of shrapnel—in his head. It would explain his behavior.”
They exchanged a manly laugh.
“Well,” Davuth went on, “what is your name, friend of Ta Mick?”
“My name is Robert O’Grieve.”
“Are you going there with your girlfriend?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is she legal age?”
“Of course she is. She’s twenty-five.”
“And you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Well, you’ll have to pay the toll anyway. It’s ten dollars this time.”
Simon didn’t object at all.
“Are you staying the night at Moonrise?” Davuth asked.
“Maybe a night or two. We like the nature. My girlfriend likes the woods.”
“Is that right?”
Davuth smiled at the girl. She was, indeed, quite pretty and definitely under twenty-five.
“Is that right, miss?”
“Yes,” she said, not looking back at him.
“Well, isn’t that fine?”
Pocketing the ten dollars, Davuth stepped back from the car and looked down its length, taking in the scratched doors, the dusty hubs and the fenders about to fall off. There was a smell of drugs about the whole thing. He thought for a moment of making this wretch open the trunk and show him the contents and he was sure he would find the goods. The bribe then would be astronomical. The barang would beg and sweat. It would be gratifying, but the sun was now on his back and he felt an angry weariness and an indifference even to the prospect of quick money. The irritation of heat and weariness. One never knew with these people. They often had the strangest connections in highe
r places, one had to tread lightly with them. Whites were bags of tricks. They could die like a fly or kick up a fuss. His commander back in the day had killed one once with a pickaxe and it did not feel right. Now they were still rich but Davuth made his calculation and stepped back from the provocation. He waved at the road, and there was a curt permission in his hand, a tired relaxation of his authority. Yet his eye didn’t miss anything.
“He’s the bastard to watch,” the girl said as they went past him and she looked quickly over her shoulder and caught the sun shining on his pitted face and the leather of the holster.
The man even smiled at her.
“Never mind him,” Simon said.
“No, he’s watching us.”
“He’s just a cop like all cops. They don’t pay them.”
The girl knew better, she knew her own people better.
They came into the upland woods. The road ran past a large house with a dog tethered in the yard and shiny black chickens and a Land Rover too grand for its surroundings. Farther on there was a sign for Moonrise. The road there was like a mud footpath, the trees vaulting it.
At the top the forest cleared and they could hear the sound of a forceful river. In the clearing were a handful of wooden buildings and a tree house with vines falling down from it. When the engine cut they heard the river even more clearly, its rippling suddenly loud in the silence, and they saw the main house which must have been made from scratch by the owner himself. It was wide open with a kind of loggia festooned with wind chimes.
The Scot was in the sunlight in the middle of his property cutting blocks of wood with an axe. He was naked but for a Khmer sarong and his sweat glistened on the tattoos covering his white skin. He had noticed them but continued with his task. The axe came down and the splinters flew and then finally he stopped and turned and looked over at the Saber now parked at the edge of the clearing.
—
They got out and walked over to the loggia and the Scot came over with his axe and, after a delayed reaction, smiled at the American whom he now recognized. It was the shabby outfit that had thrown him. He took in the lovely but run-down Khmer girl and he got the picture at once and called over to his maid to make some tea and bring it out onto the loggia.
Hunters in the Dark Page 13