Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  Life was far too enjoyable to waste it working at the mid-level of things. He gave up the idea of writing and wondered instead about traveling for five years, dropping everything and folding up the wigwam. But even that required too much planning. When the old man called him a “worthless sonofabitch” he internally agreed and wondered if there was a remedy to being one.

  It was rumored among his horrified family that as a boy of eleven he had tried to burn down a dorm at his prep school in Vermont. Through a series of hysterical confrontations he had gradually persuaded them that it was a lie, a defamation on the part of his hated schoolmates, but the reality was that he had tried to burn down the dorm and kill all the sleeping boys, whom he loathed. The strange thing was that through those hysterical confrontations he had come to doubt his own memory of the event and to start believing that he really was innocent and persecuted. Moreover, he enjoyed this slippage, this moving from one version (the true one) to another one (the false one) which cast him in a better light. It seemed to him more truthful to the spirit of things, not the letter of things. He was not a real arsonist, any more than he was a real dropout from Yale.

  He had suffered a mental breakdown during his second year. He was diagnosed with clinical depression and began to take the medications. But the chemistry did not agree with him; he was going down to New York every weekend and hiding out in a place on Rivington which he kept secret from his family. He began going over to Brooklyn to score his smack and “China white” in the streets around the Gowanus projects.

  It soon became his favorite area of the city—he sometimes picked up from his dealer on the Carroll Street footbridge overlooking the canal or on Butler nearby where there was always a strong smell of roasting coffee from the warehouses. He would sit in the Thomas Greene park after hours, watching the trucks shooting down Third Avenue and the crack whores walking alone up from the darkness of Douglass Street. He was always there, half high or mostly stoned but with enough money to keep them happy.

  When he went down Nevins they called out “Skinny” to him, because everyone on the street had to have a name. They took him onto the warehouse rooftops for blow jobs or into the empty Douglass and Degraw swimming pool. Years later, when he first arrived in Phnom Penh, it made him think of that half-forgotten place.

  That was his secret life at Yale. On other weekends he went to family dinners out on Long Island or at the Pierre Hotel. He insulted his sisters after a few bottles of champagne and then he took the last train back to New Haven. There must have been something about these extremes that he relished. It was easy for an upper-class boy to slum, many of them did, but eventually they grew out of it and took the jobs desperately being offered to them on Wall Street by their alarmed kin. He had no intention of doing the same.

  When his grandfather died, the old ladies’ footwear manufacturer from Worcester unexpectedly left him a sizable amount of money. There was nothing his father could do to thwart the transfer, and Simon packed up his bags and left Mendocino without a second thought. He always left without a second thought. He was always free to roll in a leisurely fashion downhill, as he thought of it. For how can you roll uphill?

  He drifted back to New York, then Paris and Barcelona and a few other cities suitable for rich boys who didn’t need to engage with the local economy. His funds began to diminish but he had not paid attention. His fleeting businesses rose briefly and then failed predictably, and as each one failed he moved on to a new one with his own money and then his grandfather’s money and then, at long last, the money of an uncle here and half-forgotten cousin there. His family began to think of him as a wastrel, though the word was old-fashioned relative to what he actually was. But throughout it all he never lost his taste for reading and beautiful things and his careful, attentive visual snobberies, which were applied to everything from female makeup to chessboards and bespoke shoes. He knew that such things didn’t save you, but they did pass the time. It was only in the East, however, that he had finally come to understand that he was good at nothing and that being good at nothing did not prevent him from being a success. He had learned to make money in new ways, he had adapted to his own failure and turned it into a way of being happy.

  —

  They did not sleep, as he had foreseen, and during the night a storm broke over the mountain and they came outside onto the cabin’s porch and smoked. They dressed and packed the suitcase again and Simon wrote a quick note to his friend. Pressing matters, no time to explain. He left money for a night’s stay with the note and left it on the bed and then they whiled away the dark hours coming out of their high. Simon had no idea where they would go next. It was just a matter of disappearing for a few days and it was likely better to move than stay in one place.

  Perhaps they would go to the north and find a village to hide in. He had done it before after a drug sale had gone wrong. He had once sold cocaine to a Khmer club owner who had decided to kill him because he thought it wasn’t pure—a jolly caper. He had learned all the tricks of evasion, the thousand and one ways of disappearing.

  He wondered what his dead father would think seeing him in this pitiful condition. That thunderous and silky Wall Street man would have been amazed more than outraged, but deep down he would not have been surprised. He told all his friends that Simon was “scum.” His only son had never worked properly for a living and his tastes had always been dubious. A violent death in Cambodia would not have struck the old man as unexpected, Simon thought bitterly. It would have seemed logical. A body floating in the river at dawn in a pair of Brooks Brothers socks.

  It was about five when they got going at last. The rain came down with a lazy savagery as they struggled up to the house and threw the suitcase into the back of the car. Everyone was asleep, and the cicadas roared in the forests that Mick had reputedly bought from Ta Mok, Pol Pot’s most trusted man. They sat in the front seats for a moment and began to laugh. They were still half stoned and the effects of the heroin had not cleared from their senses. Nevertheless, they started the car and drove quietly back down the slippery hill toward the track that curved down the mountain’s side. The first light was about to reveal the papaya trees stark and burned in the near distance.

  THIRTEEN

  Ouksa drove down the same track with a stunned disbelief in his own luck. Standing by his car and staring into the loggia he had noticed and recognized Simon at once, but controlling his instinct to make himself known or extend a greeting he had turned away as if nothing had happened and driven away as coolly as he could manage. In the driving, bestial rain the act had been easy. But he shook with excitement.

  So the barang con man had made it up to the Moonrise Lodge. It was a place which all the cab drivers around the border knew, even if they had few reasons to ever go there. He had come up there with his girl to hide out while the landlord went through his abandoned rental by the river and the locals whispered about the scandalous goings-on which had gone rippling through their lives for months.

  It was said the American had thrown a man into the river while high on Ecstasy. They said, too, that he went asking for the bodies of barang suicides so he could pay for their funeral expenses in exchange for going through their pockets. No one could imagine how much money he had made this way. Thousands. People had seen ghosts walking around his property, the souls of the dead walking through the wild fields that surrounded Beauchamp’s house and sloped down to the river. It was an evil business; he was an evil man in his way. Gently spoken and mannered but off on the devil’s business. The Ap was close to him. Now he had ripped off the nice young Englishman and he had heard about that too. The boatman who took Robert south had returned north and talked about the matter high and low. Paid to keep his mouth shut, he had duly opened it for nothing.

  It was one hot Sunday that Ouksa had heard about it in Battambang and he drove down to the river to seek that man out. The boatman was drunk in a run-down bar and he bought him a drink and took him down to the water so they could talk.<
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  “Hey, brother,” he said to him, “can’t you keep your voice down a bit? Just let me buy you some drinks and talk to me. Just you and me.”

  “What’s it to you, brother?”

  “It’s something I should know about. I know that barang kid.”

  “You do—how’s that?”

  “I was his driver for a day.”

  “That English kid?”

  “Yeah, the shy one. So you took him downriver?”

  “The boss paid me to take him.”

  “The American?”

  “Him. We carried him out and put him in the boat.”

  “Funny business. Where’d you drop him off?”

  “A place I know. He went into the city.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  The man looked at him with cold and vapid eyes.

  “The drivers told me at the jetty. Where else could he go?”

  Ouksa bought him a second Saeng. The man was tottering, the sun in his face, and flies danced around them and shimmered against the water.

  “Was he able to walk?” Ouksa said.

  “He walked. He woke up during the ride.”

  “What was it all about, brother?”

  The man laughed. “How the fuck should I know?”

  “He must have said something.”

  “The American didn’t say anything. The English kid asked for his bag on the boat, but it wasn’t there.”

  “A bag?”

  “Yeah, his bag was missing.”

  Ouksa bit his lip and looked down at the river.

  “Did you come back to the American’s jetty after?”

  “I did. The American and his girl were there. They were getting into their car.”

  “A sweet job for you.”

  “I’ll say. I didn’t have to kill anyone.”

  The joke went nowhere.

  “No,” Ouksa said grimly. “You didn’t have to kill anyone.” Then he said, “What’s your name, brother?”

  “Thy.”

  He walked back to his taxi and thought. It was clear enough to a clear mind. The man had followed him and pestered him for another drink so he gave him a buck and got into his taxi. He then drove off angrily, feeling that he had missed out on something. He had gotten to the two grand first but he had let it slip through his fingers like a fool. The American had not been so stupid. Eagle eyes, that one. He remembered the blue eyes that had tracked him, dismissed him and yet knew everything about him.

  For days he lay by the river in the afternoons watching the boats go by. When it rained he lay on the backseat of his car and slept and when the evening was dry he went to a bar he knew and sat there impassively slinging back brandy shots and following the girls with his eyes.

  He trawled the temples looking for soft touches, preferably elderly Europeans always ready to overpay. Campy blond girls who might be up for some extra fun. They never were. They didn’t come here for sex. And the sights were not visited much in the rainy season.

  One day that week he had a Buddhist group from Vancouver who wanted to see Wat Sampeau and he took four of them there for an exorbitant price. He walked up with them to the sinister caves and took them down to see the carved Buddha where the dead were remembered and the shrines sitting on top of their spurs of rock with prayer ribbons fluttering in lines all around them. He didn’t like going there, or any haunted place, but the money was good. It was not, however, enough for him or his crippled wife. She could no longer work and for six months he had been driving the roads every day to make enough money to keep them sane. What use had the prayer flags for her? She had smashed her leg in a metal workshop.

  The Buddhists would never understand such a thought, though they would certainly empathize with it. So he walked with them down the winding path that looked over a sea of dark green jungle with the loudspeakers of the wat by the road echoing up, and he talked amiably about all the temples he knew while his mind raced ahead into a dark and sinister future that would certainly be his. His wife’s smashed leg seemed insignificant next to the memorials to the thousands murdered on top of Wat Sampeau but he had not even been born in that period and it didn’t mean as much to him as it apparently did to the rich Canadians. They gave him a handsome tip for the day and bought his wife a pair of new shoes which she could hardly wear.

  He thought about her asleep in their house at the edge of the fields as he waited in the bend of the road below the mountain where Moonrise stood. It was still raining and he turned off the car’s lights and waited with all the patience of which he was remarkably capable. He had called at eleven and told her to go to sleep, he was on a job for wealthy Chinese. She knew he was often with the Chinese, even though he loathed them. They were essential to his fortunes but they disgusted him.

  Often, in fact, his clients filled him with a bottomless and directionless contempt. Especially the gamblers who rolled around Pailin while he waited for them for hours outside casinos and karaoke joints. Those parasites who thought his country was a genocide museum and a playground but nothing too serious. Who behaved as if he didn’t exist. He hated the way they threw money at him, with a flick of the wrist, as if he was an extra in their shimmery theater of lust and poker. Well, I exist all right, he said aloud as he sat behind the wheel of his taxi. I exist a lot. A car’s lights had appeared.

  It was the Saber, which had reached the bottom of the mountain track and had nosed its way onto the main road. It hesitated and Ouksa heard the engine tick as the driver let it idle and dithered. Finally it turned toward Pailin on that lightless road and when it did so he saw the red taillights move off at a fair clip. He started his own engine but left the lights and followed. The rain helped him, because nothing could be seen in a rearview mirror without lights.

  Simon drove at about fifty toward the east and Sothea soon fell asleep on his shoulder. They had the radio on and it was old Khmer pop from the seventies. Ouksa followed a quarter of a mile behind and when the Saber slowed he slowed as well, judging the distance expertly. The Saber was slowing again as if it was about to stop. Simon indeed was looking for a spot to pull over so he could pee and take a breather. Sothea had woken and he told her he was going to stop for a few minutes and they could clear their heads. She rubbed her eyes and felt with a quiet instinct that something was behind them and turned to look through the muddy rear window. Seeing nothing, she was half reassured. They then pulled over into a muddy verge, beyond which stood tall sugarcane. They turned off the engine but kept the lights on and got out into the rain, which had lessened, and walked to the edge of the cane, which trembled gently in the rain. She went on a little ahead and entered the glade of cane that reached above her head. She was exhausted but she needed to pee as well and her head was still spinning from the dope. It was, from Ouksa’s perspective, the moment of opportunity.

  He had stopped his own car down the road and crept along the hard shoulder until he was behind the parked Saber. He had taken out of his trunk a baseball bat he always kept there. Every driver in that semi-lawless place had a weapon of some kind and his was a mild one. He saw the white man standing with his back to the road at the edge of the sugarcane and the girl slipping into the thicket ahead of him. He crept up to the car and hid behind it and then moved silently around it—still covered by darkness—and like a classical dancer aimed his pitch with the bat with an elegance that surprised himself.

  Simon, at last, sensed that something was amiss and began to turn, his eyes wide, and the bat smacked against his head and sent him reeling downward into the ditch that separated the verge from the plantation. He rolled down there with a wild grunt and his arms flailed about for a moment and then he lay quite still as the blood poured into his eyes and he saw something for a moment—the clouds, of course—and Sothea, seeing the whole thing, let out a cry that reached his ears just as they were disappearing.

  Ouksa knew that he had achieved everything with one blow. He jumped over the ditch and plunged into the cane in pursuit of the
girl. The stalks were so pregnant with water that as he crashed through them he was showered with drops. But soon, as the girl shot ahead of him, surprisingly fast and nimble and quiet, he passed out of the beam of the Saber’s headlights and the total darkness gradually got the better of him. He began to curse and lash out at the sugarcane with the bloodied bat. He could not afford to leave the two cars and the body like that by the side of the road, visible to anyone who happened to pass by. Soon, therefore, he slowed down and felt short of breath and dizzy and he dropped the bat and rested his hands on either knee while he caught his breath. He listened as he straightened himself up and he knew the girl was faster than him and had disappeared entirely into that sea of vegetation. He couldn’t hear her but he knew that she was still running, because the prey will always try a little harder than the predator. He wanted then to call out to her softly, in their language, and tell her lies, recall her and draw her back in. He had nothing against her, after all. He wanted to tell her sensibly that he was only doing this for his crippled wife, and it was no one’s fault that she had broken her leg in a metalworker’s shop. It had nothing to do with her, but by the same token it had nothing to do with him either. It was circumstances, little one.

  Abandoning the hunt, he returned to his car and threw the bat back into the trunk. Then he looked up and down the empty road and went over to the Saber and turned off the lights. All the doors were open and he went through the car thoroughly. He found the passports and the suitcase, which was on the backseat, and when he opened it and tipped out the clothes he found the money wrapped in a plastic bag and the heroin equipment. There was some dope he could sell but some instinct told him to leave it well alone and just take the dollars. It was the simpler path. He also had a distaste for drugs and their culture. He therefore left everything except the cash and the passports—they indeed might be valuable—and he went back to his car and put them all underneath the front passenger seat. He rested again, drenched in rain and perspiration and anxiety, and then returned to the Saber, closing its doors. He went back down to the ditch and stood above the body and wondered what he should do with it. This, at least, he had not thought through very well. He could leave it there with the heroin in the car—the local cops would likely shrug—or he could drag it back into the car. Or he could drag the body far into the sugarcane. In this way it would not be discovered for a while longer, though it would imply the existence of a person who had dragged it there.