by Jeff Long
He explained how military investigators had found plow blades made of cut-up propellers, wooden ox bells with bullet shells for clappers, and handmade sickles and pots and pans still bearing telltale serial numbers. The recovery teams always deployed with a database called Brite Lite.
“The pilot and his plane just vanished into the abyss. All signs of the plane, even the crash scar, disappeared. Thirty years of farming devoured every trace. Even the satellite photos showed nothing. We knew the plane was out here somewhere. We’ve known for years. We just didn’t know enough.” We.
“So you’ve got farm tools left by ghosts, and a plane without a pilot,” she said.
Kleat cut a look at her full of suspicion. “There’s nothing supernatural about this,” he snapped.
Molly was taken off guard. “Of course not,” she said.
“I’ve done this before,” he declared. “An air crash isn’t rocket science. The physics are simple. The path of impact is known. We have his trajectory. We’re unearthing his wings. It’s a matter of time. He’ll answer to us.”
That was a curious way to put it, even imperious, as if the dead pilot were a fugitive or a truant. Molly gently slid the shovel back among its brothers.
They continued along the path. It was past noon, but the sun only seemed to reach higher in the sky. The light would have been painful if not for the checkered shawl draped across her head and shoulders. They walked in silence for another half mile or so, the straps of her camera bag creaking. The air smelled of water and sewage. The trail seemed to go on forever.
Then, far off in the sheets of heat, Molly caught sight of the gypsy man. By now she had no sense of direction, no idea where the road was or—looking back—where the excavators were harrowing the earth. She fastened on the gypsy as if he were a magnetic north. It felt like she was traveling in circles around him.
“There he is again,” she said, pointing.
Kleat squinted across the fields. “Him,” he said.
“Who do you think he is?”
“There are always stray dogs around the bones. I told the captain it was a mistake encouraging him. This is a recovery, not a lonely-hearts club.”
“Duncan said he might be a drug addict or the son of a missing soldier.”
An expression came onto Kleat’s face, as if she were joking. “But that is Duncan,” he said quietly.
She brought her camera up and telescoped the figure through her lens. There was the mane of brown hair and the sparkle of his steel briefcase. Duncan was walking along the top of a paddy wall with a long stick in one hand, poking at random.
She lowered her camera. “I didn’t know.” She couldn’t think what else to say.
A stray dog? Kleat didn’t make any attempt to apologize. She didn’t say anything. Suddenly she didn’t know whom to trust. In this flat land that seemed incapable of hiding anything, everything seemed concealed.
3.
It was a story to sweat and bleed for, and she did both over the coming weeks, down in the trenches, under the sun, earning her way into the family of them.
She was a photographer first, a writer second. The lens was her habitat. It was her sanctuary. Prose came more slowly. It always came after the picture.
The afternoon the Times editor called to assign her the story, Molly had gone straight to Mike’s Camera and maxed out her credit card on a digital Nikon with all the bells and whistles. She had wanted it forever, but could never justify the sticker shock, over $10,000. Now that she was going national, though, she figured the camera would pay for itself.
With digital you could edit the image and change the look, even turn color into grainy black and white, as she’d contemplated, to evoke a ’60s ’Nam-scape. It would give her the ability to mimic the great war photographers, Henri Huet and Tim Page and Larry Burrows and Kyochi Sawada and Robert Capa, all without lugging blocks of Velvia and Kodak through the tropical heat.
The camera was unlike any she’d ever owned. It was more than the usual sum of lenses, filters, and film, more than a boxful of memories. Its instant recall made it both a tool and a communal event.
On a hunch, she had brought a pair of five-inch barber’s scissors. Her dad—her stepfather—had been a barber. Never underestimate the value of a free haircut. The scissors paid in aces with the recovery team. People flocked to her tent in the evenings. While she trimmed their hair, they talked about music, sports, movies, and home. She shared anything they wanted to know about photography, from the rule of thirds to underexposing one f-stop for the midday glare. Also she showed them her camera, and that was the real icebreaker.
With a flip of a switch, they could see themselves the way she saw them. She flipped the switch. The display lit up.
Here was their dig, and in the distance nut-brown children wrestling on water buffalo, National Geographic country as far as the eye could see.
Here were the faces of RE-1, black, white, and brown, all rendered one color, the color of Cambodia’s dirt, the color of blood oranges. Here they mined the earth, here they shook it through screens with quarter-inch mesh.
Here was the captain in repose, toasting her with a bottle of warm grape Gatorade while he smoked his evening Havana and read one of her Vogue magazines. He was smart and freethinking, a postmodern soldier who reveled in not carrying a weapon, and lived to raise the lost souls from the dirt.
There was Kleat, a dead end. The brother angle would have been so sweet. But after the first week of him, she knew there was no way around his hatred of the people and the land. Kleat treated Cambodia like a curse or a disease. There was no way she could turn his bile into nobility, and so Molly had dropped him from her story and started framing her shots to exclude him.
And here was Duncan, who was not part of her story either. But she could not keep her camera off him; there was something she liked. Here he stared into a dark square hole covered with grid strings, like a scout about to leap into the underworld. Here he stood among the laborers, head and shoulders above them, spinning some hilarious joke in fluent Khmer. Here he sat on his briefcase with his sketchbook on one knee, drawing faces and scenes and artifacts that no one was allowed to see because of his shyness.
She peeked into his tent one afternoon, and was startled by its austerity. It was bare except for a black Ace comb and a toothbrush tucked in the wall pocket. He slept on the ground without sheets or a sleeping pad or a mosquito net. He owned nothing but the clothes on his back and whatever he carried in that briefcase.
Here was their base camp, a hodgepodge of wall tents, pup tents, and her North Face dome. They had pitched their camp where a village once stood, not knowing that for some reason the locals thought it haunted.
They used a clothesline strung between trees for their occasional volleyball games. Barbecue ball, she called it. Roasting the weenies. Almost six feet tall, she played like a gladiator, six-packing the ball into the faces of husky trash talkers. She bloodied noses, made kills, tooled them mercilessly…and they loved her for it.
Not unnaturally, so far from home, they began to court her. It was nothing personal. After she sliced herself on a piece of the wreckage, the special forces medic who stitched her thigh proposed marriage. Another Romeo braved the mosquitoes and recited Shakespeare to the wall of her tent at night. One morning, Kleat caught her shooting him. He rose up from his washbasin, the water dripping from his salt-and-pepper chest hair, and opened his arms to her.
She felt like a hypocrite, keeping them at bay. After all, day after day, she stalked them intimately. But that was the way it was. Molly didn’t tell them about one bad night in Oklahoma long ago. She just gave them her policy: no hookups on a shoot. And went on seducing them for her camera.
Each night, she downloaded her day’s harvest into a digital wallet, a portable hard drive, and cataloged her shots and watched her story grow. While the soldiers listened to Dr. Dre or Beethoven, read paperbacks, or played Game Boys, she lay on her back in the dark of her tent and the image
s lit her face. The wallet became her dream box. Some nights she couldn’t tell if she was awake or dreaming with the crickets going wild outside under the Cambodian stars.
Among professionals, the purists argued that digital wasn’t pure. The geeks argued that there were still bugs in the machine, and there were, in hers at any rate, some serious gremlins in some of the shots. She became aware of them gradually.
Within a week of arriving, Molly had gotten their labyrinth memorized, and made a habit of waking first each morning, before dawn, to visit the dig site. Every day the site grew longer. There was nothing much to do at this hour. Night still pooled in the holes. It was too early for the teams to work and too dark for her to shoot. But it was cooler then, and she had her best privacy. She wandered along the cut-open earth, alone with her thoughts in the gray mist. But not quite alone, she began to realize.
Ghostly figures ambled across the fields, distant and only half visible above the ground fog. She supposed they were villagers. Some wore kromas over their heads or around their necks. Some carried mute babies.
By five the sky would start to gain color. Roosters crowed far away. She could practically taste the wood smoke of breakfast fires in invisible villages. Then, just as the sun broke the horizon, a faraway temple bell would ring once, just once. Each dawn broke that way, with the bell’s single gong. The early morning wanderers would fade off and she would return to make her breakfast.
On a whim one morning, Molly lugged along her tripod and snapped a shot of the villagers in the dim light. She didn’t expect much, and when she downloaded the camera into her wallet at the end of the day, there was next to nothing. The camera had captured the fields and haze, though none of the wanderers.
But a few days later, in scrolling through the JPEG files, she discovered that her morning shot was populated. The wanderers had been buried in the pixels somehow, and the camera was finally letting them rise to the surface. Not only that, every time she turned the display on again, the image changed. Like spirits, the villagers came and went. There might be five people when she turned the device off, and ten or dozens when she turned it on again.
The photo became something of a freak show, attracting a small audience of soldiers who would drop by to see if the digital figures had moved around or vanished back into the mist. Duncan joked that her camera was possessed.
A navy explosives specialist diagnosed the ghosts as faulty software. Digital noise, he called it. In getting compressed and decompressed, the image apparently altered itself, as if peeling away layers of reality.
One morning she noticed one of the hooded figures trailing her in the muggy gloom. She stopped. He stopped. “Hello?” she said, approaching him.
It was old Samnang, wearing a blue-and-white kroma like a shawl, and under that a headset for his tape recorder. All but buried in the mist, his prosthesis had a blue sandal glued to the pink foot.
“Ah, bonjour, Molly,” he said. Maw-lee. His accent, so beautiful.
“Samnang, what a surprise,” she said without surprise. It was so clear. “Did the captain tell you to follow me?”
“The captain? Not at all.”
“This was your idea,” she said.
Samnang sniffed at the air. “The hour is so fresh, don’t you agree?”
She could have been rude and insisted on her privacy, but she liked Samnang. He was as honest as a monk, and the American recovery teams hired him year after year to run their crews. He jokingly compared himself to a chicken scratching in the dirt for a living. She had never heard him speak about his past. He never mentioned the loss of his leg, never said a word about any family. Following Duncan’s example, she made a point of calling him by his full name, not Sam like the others did.
Finally she said, “So what are you listening to?”
During the wet season, when excavation was pointless, Samnang used his U.S. dollars to go around the countryside collecting folk songs. Before the water washes them away.
He laid the kroma along his neck and handed Molly his headset. He pressed the button. Expecting folk music, she was amazed to hear Margo Timmins singing on The Trinity Sessions. “The Cowboy Junkies?” she said.
He smiled sheepishly. “An old vice of mine.”
After that there was no way she could refuse his company. They started walking together.
“Duncan told me about your photograph of the morning people,” Samnang said. “I thought to see them for myself.”
It occurred to her that he had come to protect her. Did he fear they might resent her presence? But they seemed unaware of her. For that matter, they seemed unaware of one another.
“They’re harmless,” she said. “They never look at me. They never come close.”
“Are there any out there now?”
She counted a woman with two children in the fog, and a man standing in place, looking off. “Just three,” she told him.
“But some mornings, more?”
“Many more. I wonder if they’re studying the damage. You know, figuring out how to repair the paddy walls before the rains come.”
“What are they doing now?”
She glanced at Samnang and his black eyes glistened inside the lips of his shawl. He was watching her face, not even trying to look for them. Was he testing her, or were his eyes too old? She turned her head. Several more had appeared a hundred yards to the side, motionless or nearly so. One drifted along some hidden dike path. “Nothing,” she told him. “They’re just standing out there, like they’re waiting for a train or something.”
Samnang nodded his head slowly, intent on her face.
“My other thought was that they might be foraging,” she said.
“ ‘Foraging,’ ” he repeated.
“Like a cargo cult or something. Salvaging the plane’s wire and metal. Getting a little treasure before the day starts and the Americans show up. This is their backyard, after all.”
“Have you seen them taking anything? Reaching into the ground? Digging?”
“Never. They never do anything. They don’t even talk to each other.”
He had risen early for her. He could still be sleeping. She felt responsible. “You shouldn’t worry about me,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
“The villagers are quite frightened by them,” Samnang said.
She frowned. These were the villagers. “I don’t understand.”
“They complain to the government. They want them gone.”
She was trying to keep up with him. “So these people come from another region,” she tried. “They’re poaching the metal.”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“It is a local matter.”
What a strange battle. A trespass each morning before dawn, and with babies and children, too. But never a confrontation.
“You said the villagers complained. Why don’t the soldiers make them leave then?” she asked. The Cambodian government had posted a dozen troops to guard—or contain—the American forensics expedition. They did little except lie in hammocks, or squat above the dig and gossip in the sun.
“They are just as brave as the villagers at this hour,” Samnang said. “No one comes, except you.”
“And you,” she said.
He smiled. “Anyway, it wouldn’t help. You find these morning people all through the country.”
That was the second time he had said it that way. “Morning people?”
“Now you have made me one, too,” he joked, growing even more elliptical. She decided to drop it. A local matter.
Just then the sun cracked the night. The haze lit like fire. In the sudden flare of color, it was hard to see. The figures began to dissipate. That distant bell rang across the fields. Its single note vibrated in the air.
Molly felt the heat against her face. “I have to see that bell someday,” she said.
Next morning, he was waiting for her again. It was clear. Since she was going to persist in these morning w
alks, he would accompany her. Their walks became for her the high point of every day.
When Kleat heard about her new friend, he advised her to dump Samnang. “Ditch him,” he said. “The old man’s KR. Or was.”
KR was a universal phrase, part of every language spoken in Cambodia. Khmer Rouge, a French label, the Red Khmers, red for Communist, red for blood. “That’s crazy,” she said. “He was a professor at the university. How could he be KR? They killed people like him.”
“Open your eyes. You haven’t seen him with the men? He never raises his voice, and he’s a cripple. But they always do what he tells them. One word and it’s done.”
“That’s how it’s supposed to work, Kleat.”
“But they’re afraid of him.”
It made no sense to a guy like Kleat how this gentlest of men was able to control the pent-up tempest of the workers. Born and raised in violent refugee camps, many of the local Khmer men were semi-wild. At night some got drunk in their villages, gambled, beat their women, and bloodied each other with knives and axes. Molly had pictures of that, too.
But even the worst toughs obeyed Samnang without question. “They respect him,” she said.
“He has a power over them,” Kleat argued.
“Like voodoo?”
“Laugh. He’s KR, I tell you.”
“The KR don’t exist anymore.”
“Tell that to the workers. They have their memories.”
“If he was KR, what’s he doing here?”
“The same thing you’re doing,” Kleat said to her. “Making a buck. Doing penance. I don’t know.”
Duncan was sitting there. He said it was none of Kleat’s business, even if Samnang had been KR. “Everyone has secrets they’d rather forget.”
“Not secrets like that,” Kleat said.
“Let up,” Duncan said. “Survival always has a price tag.”
4.
At the end of her third week, Samnang approached Molly. “I have something to show you.”