Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  “We need to hang out for a couple of days,” Simon said matter-of-factly. “I can pay this time.”

  “I’m glad of that.”

  “I got a lucky break and some cash.”

  “Did ye now?”

  “Yeah, I got a lucky streak at the Diamond.”

  “Fuck ye, I cannae believe it.”

  The bright heat of the day had reached its climax and now the rain would come back. They sat on cushions, in a vast woodland loneliness, and Sothea looked up at the homemade lamps that were hung above the tables. They were made out of old tank shell casings.

  “Aye,” the Scot said to her, “everything’s made from munitions I found on my land.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said in Khmer.

  “That’s the truth,” he said in the same language.

  “Look, Mick,” Simon began at once, “I got some stuff as well which I might want to keep here. Are you gonna mind?”

  “The wife says no to drugs from nae on.”

  “The wife? You’re married?”

  “Got married last month to a farm girl. She’s a right-on Buddhist.”

  “Fuck. You don’t say.”

  “I do say and she says no drugs on the premises.”

  “Well, Christ, Mick, look—I can’t risk running around with bags of that shit, not after my win at the Diamond. You know how word gets around. Every punk in the neighborhood will know it’s me. It’s like having a price on my head. You know that. Explain that to your missus.”

  “There’s no explaining anything to her. No drugs is no drugs.”

  “All right, so you want us to die?”

  Mick had his laugh and eventually so did the other two.

  “Who’s talking about dying, ye little prick? Just cart it around with ye. And don’t get high every fooking day.”

  “At least we can stay here two nights, no?”

  “As ye can see, there’s no one here. Though we’re expecting an English couple tonight.”

  “An English couple?”

  “Aye, in case ye didn’t notice, it’s a fooking hotel.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. They’re foreigners anyway.”

  “You can stay as long as ye like. Just keep a lid on it.”

  “Is there a cabin by the river we can have?”

  “Aye, Robert Louis Stevenson is available.”

  “What about Rob Roy?”

  “Nay, it’s for the missus.”

  “All right, we’ll take Stevenson. Is there a mosquito net?”

  “Obviously there is. There’s air con in the wee hours too.”

  “Luxury. How much?”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  The tea came and they relaxed. Sothea flirted with the Scot, and the Scot softened as if succumbing to the spirit of the place and soon the warm gin was out and they were recalling the last time they went to Phnom Penh together.

  “But,” Mick said, “ye’ve not been down there in a while.”

  “No, I was renting a place on the river and liking it. Sothea here persuaded me not to go down and she was right.”

  “Aye, women always are.”

  They were now aware of a group of Khmer girls and older women sitting by the kitchen and watching them while they peeled vegetables with knives. There was a cool sarcasm about them. The Moonrise was not, in the end, a casual or relaxing place. It had desperation written all over it, a desperate attempt to make a little paradise on land bought from a Khmer Rouge warlord. The bowls on the tables were, like the lamps, made from shell casings and the ashtrays too. Simon had always wondered how the mad Scot lived here with his Khmer groupies and his bastard children but it was not a question that ever needed to be answered. It was happiness of a kind and one had to end up somewhere. He had not done so badly for himself. Then he thought of the heroin and the cash in the car and he considered that the best thing to do was just carry them over casually to the cabin and not say a thing. He could see the path that led down to the river with the yellow tape on either side and the same warnings about land mines. The whole property was still mined and most of it was off-limits. One had to be careful about getting too liquored up at night and wandering back to one’s cabin outside the marked paths. It was the place to be because it was so remote and so safe. It was alarming about the English couple arriving but one could, presumably, dance around their cluelessness.

  Before the rain, Mick walked with them down to the cabin on the river. It stood on a steep bank surrounded by papaya trees. Its wooden terrace looked straight down into the black and ominous river, along which grew what looked like prickly poppy flowers. There was a musty scent in the air, a smell maybe of distant fire smoke.

  They laid the suitcase on the terrace and the Scot opened the door for them and turned on the rickety AC to take the edge off the stifling heat. Inside it was bare enough: a bed and a rocking chair.

  “Dinner at six. I hope the English aren’t here yet.”

  “Me too,” Simon said. “When are they supposed to be?”

  “Nae way of saying. They’re coming overland from Thailand.”

  “Bloody bad manners. All right, we’ll come up for dinner.”

  “The wife is making haggis.”

  “Christ.”

  “Just joking, ye bastard. It’ll be omelette with chilies.”

  When he had gone, Simon and Sothea stretched out on the bed and decided not to shoot up. They could have sex instead. The calm and torpid river seemed to encourage this gentler course of action, its sounds now so close that they subdued all others. The windows had no curtains and so they watched the sky and fell asleep for some time. But Simon, in reality, was thinking continuously. How had his life fallen so low from such heights? He was not a bad person judged by ordinary measures; he had never harmed anyone physically. He had taken Robert’s money, and indeed his name, but Robert had not worked for that money, he had chanced upon it by luck while gambling in a warlord-owned casino. It was hardly clean. A man who wins dirty money is not in a position to defend it from a moral position, he will do so only from self-interest. And so self-interests collide. So what? There will be merely a winner and a loser, those most inevitable of archetypes. One might as well be the winner.

  Besides, he had done the English boy a favor. Simon could spot a would-be deserter a mile away. They usually just didn’t have the courage to follow their less conscious desires. They needed a nudge and he had given Robert that nudge. It hadn’t harmed him at all.

  He kissed Sothea’s naked arm with its dark superstitious tattoos. They had been living together for a year, brought together by dope, but he still didn’t know anything about her. She had been a waitress in a bar in Battambang but she had ambitions to go to school and become a vet. Was it possible for her to become a vet? He didn’t know. The country was an enigma to him, a forest of confusing signs. And yet it seemed like the easiest of passages from his life in New York to his life here—a matter of a few years during which he had managed to go through a large part, if not all, of his inheritance while doing little more than spinning in the dark. But for Sothea it was a different matter. For her, his self-indulgence was a ticket to somewhere else, though where that was, she had not figured out. Still, she could smell with an infallible instinct his family money, his ease and his self-confidence. There was no mistake about him—he was good luck.

  How wrong she was, he thought. The only thing he had going for him was a good education and that was far in the past and as useless as everything else in the past. What a shame he had never taken her to Montauk or the lighthouse at the far end—or to a party overlooking the park. As it was he had to tell her about it over and over. She could not understand why he had left that world for hers.

  —

  Soon, an electric bell rang out over the darkening forests. It was the Scot’s eccentric dinner bell. He shook the drowsy girl awake and they dressed and went out into a heavy, rainy dusk with a mist rolling down the snaking river. At the loggia, the Engl
ish guests had still not arrived.

  “The driver called,” Mick said, “they’re still at the border.”

  Let’s eat quickly then, Simon wanted to say.

  “They won’t be here for an hour,” he did say. “Let’s eat now, if it’s all right with you.”

  The military lamps came on and the girls laid out mosquito coils. From the wall of trees the frogs barked unseen and raindrops fell from the higher branches with a commotion of their own. They ate a creamy coconut curry made with chicken legs and jasmine rice and with it tall Lao beers. Mick told him, for the thousandth time, how he had come to buy the land from a crony of the former regime strongman Ta Mok and how he had come to make all these handsome furnishings from military material. That piece of shrapnel—it came from a mine in Angola. He knew all about mines. Just as he explained this there was a distant, muffled detonation from far off in the forest and Mick and the girls began laughing. His wife came over and showed them their new baby and the baby was laughing too.

  “It’s just a deer,” he said to the other two. “We hear one or two every twenty-four hours. They step on the mines and turn into clouds of blood. It’s quite a sight in the day.”

  Sothea turned a wary eye upon her protector. She didn’t like it that deer were blowing themselves up.

  “It’s all right,” Simon said into her ear. “They don’t feel a thing. Just pop!”

  “Aye,” the Scot said, “a deer is not the smartest.”

  “Clouds of blood?” she said.

  Simon shrugged. Such was life.

  He could sense that she was growing more nervous. She needed her hit and he had withheld it from her. Before long, however, they heard the drone of an approaching motor and a flash of headlights cut through the trees and lit for a moment the side of the main house. It also lit the lines of rain and the sweating bark of the ironwoods and one could see that it was a large, filthy local taxi. Mick stood up with a grunt and moved off to greet the car which had just arrived, bringing with it that rarest of gifts, paying guests. There was a hopeful spring in his step. He whipped a hand over his hair. Simon was furious but held his tongue, and he thought about how he could withdraw from the scene without too much fuss. It was, obviously, too late now and he would have to go through with a certain amount of formalities.

  The doors of the car slammed and the figures of two shabby English tourists appeared in the confusion of shadows, and behind them the Khmer driver holding their bags. They came in a group toward the loggia and the whites had a look of frigid alarm, as if their calculation to trust the lush images of a website had suddenly been shown to have backfired.

  “It’s just a wee lodge in the mountains—nothing really,” the proud owner was saying, leading the way.

  Simon and Sothea were obliged to get up and greet the newcomers and as they did so the driver put down the bag, at Mick’s suggestion, and hung back at the edge of the light thrown down by the crazy shell-casing lamps. Simon looked down at him briefly and a shock went through his body, as if physically. He recognized Ouksa at once. Their eyes did not meet and Simon half turned and took Sothea’s hand and pulled her to one side, to the rail which was darker than the table they were seated at. He was not sure if she would understand or even if she would recall the driver. There was no sign that Ouksa had looked over at them or recognized him. The barangs were busy making their arrangements and the man was paying him. The confusion of the rain might have helped. The transaction was completed and the driver turned away quickly and stepped back toward the car. He had left the engine running and appeared anxious to be on his way without ado. As the visitors struggled onto the loggia Mick stood at the foot of the small flight of steps and watched the car recede, lifting his hand once by way of farewell. It was entirely possible that he knew Ouksa or had had dealings with him in the past. Who could say? Simon came back to the table and they were introduced to Bill and Sarah Miles.

  “Robert,” he said to introduce himself, “Robert O’Grieve. This is my wife, Sothea. She’s a vet.”

  “Oh, a vet,” the Englishwoman cried.

  “Yes,” Sothea said to her in Khmer, “not a whore.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she’s pleased to meet you.”

  They were forced to eat all together and the meal therefore dragged on interminably. The visitors rehearsed all the tedious and entirely predictable dramas of their voyage overland from Bangkok. Was there not even one mishap that had afflicted them which he had not heard a hundred times before? Gradually, though, the rain died down and he suggested to Sothea that they go back to the cabin and get to bed early.

  “It’s one of those things about living in the country here,” he said to the Mileses. “One goes to bed extremely early. It’s like it can’t be helped.

  “At seven?” Mr. Miles said, wide-eyed.

  “Sometimes even earlier.”

  “I’ll be damned. It’s worse than Chalvington with Ripe.”

  “I am sure Mr. Mick will offer you some of his homemade brandy. We call it Khmer brandy but it’s nothing of the sort.”

  “It’s a fine drink,” Mick protested. “And it’s on the house!”

  “Will it kill us?” Mrs. Miles asked.

  “It’s been known tae happen.”

  “Maybe it’ll keep the mosquitoes away,” her husband suggested.

  “That it will,” Mick said triumphantly.

  Simon and Sothea rose and said their good-nights.

  “Just don’t go wandering about after four brandies,” Simon said. “That’s my recommendation.”

  “Why?” from the Englishwoman.

  “You might be mistaken for a deer in the dark.”

  They walked back down to the river between the lines of yellow tape and Simon held Sothea’s hand and then held her closer. Suddenly, for some reason, he felt a rush of tenderness for her, a desperate need to know that she loved him back and needed him as much as he needed her.

  “Who are those awful people?” she said quietly.

  “We call them limeys. English. They’re all right.”

  “Are they angry?”

  “I don’t know. Did they seem angry?”

  “They seemed like they were going to explode.”

  “Maybe they will explode.”

  Now, more than previously, he wanted to leave before morning. He had always gotten a strange feeling from Ouksa and seeing the driver again had raised an alarm deep within him. It was, like so many other things, an omen—and Simon believed categorically in omens. There had to be a meaning in such a coincidence. Naturally, it might not be a coincidence at all. It was a small region and people crossed each other’s paths all the time. But still, there was something about Ouksa that was not blind. He seemed to know what he was doing at all times. He was someone who kept his ear close to all grapevines. That little slithering dark-eyed snake. He had come into the forest and seen them.

  They lay on their bed and shot up with clean needles and then lay quietly in each other’s arms listening to the tree frogs and the cicadas until the lights went off outside and the darkness augmented so that the river itself gave off a kind of black luminescence.

  “Are we alone?” she said, thinking that she could hear things in the night.

  “Of course we’re alone,” he answered.

  Though he was not sure.

  “I don’t want to stay here tomorrow,” she said.

  “Nor do I. Maybe we’ll leave.”

  “Can we leave when the sun comes up?”

  “We won’t sleep anyway.”

  “Then let’s leave.”

  He lay awake wide-eyed. The Cambodian jungle had never made him feel at ease. It had a depth and velvety density that suggested something being concealed and withheld. The birds speaking to him but not saying anything he could find pleasurable. A realm of dinosaurs and reptiles, musical and lilting but also filled with ghosts. It gripped him and yet it left him cold, mentally suspended.

  When fear c
ame to him, indeed, Simon always relished it in some way. Fear was the most intense feeling by far, and the most complex. But he was not sure what he was afraid of now. It was just the smallness and madness of the room itself. His life had boiled down to rooms, it was spent entirely in rooms on the roads, but mostly in rooms. A suitcase stuffed with money that was not his, a few items of unwashed clothes and his “happiness gear.” It was vagrancy taken to a fine level.

  All his life, considered from a certain perspective, had been leading up to such an outcome. Vagrancy had become second nature to him from an early age. His dropping out from Yale had been the warning sign which even he had not heeded. His family had merely taken it to mean that their pessimism about him—formed during his early years—had proved to be accurate. Old New England families had a strong and tight-lipped fatalist streak. They were personality realists.

  They were a bit like Buddhists in that regard. His father had not argued much with him about it; Simon had made the argument that he was better suited to scriptwriting out west. It was not a very original aspiration but he had duly gone out west and written some garbage in a rented house in Twentynine Palms and then moved to Los Angeles and gradually discovered that he had even less industriousness at his disposal than he had talent. Those, however, were the fun years. He went through all the prescribed experiments of the American middle classes. He circled around the Burning Man trust-fund girls in San Francisco, he did the peyote inductions and the Esalen retreats. It was better than nothing.

  He tired of it only when his internal restlessness produced the inevitable surfeit and the drugs had begun to wear him down and make him desultory. At twenty-five he found himself in Mendocino making olive oil and living with an Iranian girl. He had plans to write a screenplay based on the life of Carlos Castaneda and his harem of deranged groupies; but it frittered itself away among the olive stills and the garden dinners sweetened with home-grown marijuana. It was hopeless, he realized.