Without realising it, Giddens started to call the boy his son, and the sentiment had been quietly reciprocated. Newcomers to the gang assumed he was Sam’s father, and neither of them did anything to challenge the notion. But there was something unspoken standing between them. Sooner or later it would be time for Sam to earn his keep by killing, and Giddens did not know if the boy would be up to it. He knew the subject needed to be discussed, but in the long and easy stretches of silence that passed between them on the forest slopes, he realised that he was afraid of losing his boy. Everyone treated Sam as the gang’s natural heir, and even Blue Star had fallen into a kind of truce with him.
One evening the boy returned from hunting with the Arikara, and saw his adopted father dashing out a man’s brains at the base of a tree. Giddens’s face was badly slashed. The broken body yielded just a handful of coins, and was buried beneath the scrub. Nothing Sam saw affected him, for he had retained the blankness of his childhood. The gang’s business made no difference to him; they might have been selling rabbit skins instead of fencing stolen goods.
Giddens had been keeping a mark on the boy’s birthday, and understood with something of a shock that he was to be fourteen the coming week. The men had gone across the ravine to Fort Redcliffe, where they had a nice little trade going in dead men’s weapons, and were not expected back until the next day. He tried to think of something special he could do for the lad, but as always the suggestion came from Sam.
‘We could go to the buffalo plain,’ he said.
‘You won’t see any, son,’ said Giddens. ‘They’ve all been driven out. The railroad has staked the land as far as you can see. Soon, when the fencing starts, the travelling parties will have to travel the long way around to go south, and they won’t come past here no more.’
‘Then we should hunt,’ said Sam, who enjoyed the thrill of stalking an animal and killing it. ‘Tonight we should stew venison, which is deer meat.’
He was always surprised when Sam sprang new words on him, and marvelled at his memory. He realised now that he loved the boy more than he had ever loved anyone; no woman had come this close. They found a small doe grazing in the bracken and clipped it, but it was the boy who brought it down. He was lithe, fleet and silent, and could get close without a creature suspecting a thing. They skinned the carcass and set the hide aside to be seasoned and dried, then carved the bony young animal into joints, although it would easily have fitted whole inside the pot. They added beans and roots and pilot bread.
Giddens had been saving the bottle for over three years now, and decided the time was right to uncork it. He poured brandy for the both of them. The boy coughed and punched his chest when he drank. A sooty cloud of bats rose in the red dusk light.
‘You never hear wolves out here,’ he said, listening intently.
‘Not for years,’ Giddens replied. ‘They moved back to the deep timber.’
It was nearly dark now. The pot popped and boiled. A butterfly flickered about the boy, as white as phosphorus, and settled on his knee. He stared hard at it. ‘I’m fourteen,’ he said. ‘Leastwise, in a few days. I’m ready.’
Giddens knew what he meant, but needed to disguise it for a moment more. ‘What you mean, son?’
‘I’m ready to do what you do.’
‘I didn’t want to speak of it before it was your time,’ said Giddens softly.
‘I just wanted you to know.’
Nothing else needed to be said. They sat by the pot and drank. Some while later, they heard a trap snap closed. An animal released a high cry of pain. ‘You got something,’ said Giddens. ‘Sounds like a hare.’
He turned to find the boy holding a Colt Peacemaker to his temple. ‘I had to wait for the trap to shut,’ said Sam blankly. ‘You’d have heard me cock the gun.’ He fired at close range, blowing out the rear left quadrant of Giddens’s skull. The forced threw Giddens onto his back. The boy climbed to his feet and disappeared for a moment, returning with a Bowie knife and a logging saw.
He cut off Giddens’s legs at the knees first, then severed his arms at the elbows and shoulders. It was hard work and he was soon sweating violently. Surprisingly, Giddens was not dead. He tried to speak, but after a while he just stared up at the sky and squeezed out tears, which the boy was careful to catch in a tin cup.
In an act of mercy, he cut off Giddens’s head. Then he slowly added the old cowboy to the pot, piece by bloody piece.
When the gang arrived back next day they were starving hungry, and he was able to feed them all. He sat with them and drank his adopted father’s tears from the tin cup. Then, once the gang had eaten their fill and had fallen into drunken stupors on their bedrolls, he quietly rose and returned to his hide. Digging beneath his blankets, he sorted through the old books Giddens had dumped from Lemuel’s trunk. He gently removed and rewrapped the Shakespeare First Folio. Then he slipped it into his saddlebag, mounted Giddens’s horse and rode out of the camp, into the waiting night.
The Velocity of Blame
‘The best way to get rid of a really big Cambodian cockroach is to wrap it in tissue paper, drop it in the toilet and pour Coco de Mer Body Butter over it so it can’t climb the walls of the bowl, because the buggers have clawed feet and can really shift. Even then, they sometimes manage to shuck off the paper and use it to climb back up out of the toilet into your bathroom.’ That’s what the man who sold Dorothy her guidebook said. She was always reading me passages from the damned thing. It had a bunch of tips for dealing with the kind of problems you encounter over there. When they didn’t work, she added her own twists. It was one of those manuals obsessed with hygiene and the strength of the dollar, and its contributors were so paranoid about being ripped off that you lost faith in human nature the longer you kept reading it. I made her throw it away when we decided to stay on.
I’ll admit, it took us a while to get used to the bugs in Southeast Asia, but I thought they’d turn out to be the least of our problems. There would be other issues to deal with. The food, the people, the heat, the past, the politics. I should have added another problem to that list: lack of communication.
We came to Siem Reap to do the tourist thing, hire bikes and see the temples of Angkor Wat at sunset, climbing over the temples of Ta Keo and Ta Prohm, where great tree roots entwine the carvings until it’s impossible to tell what is hand carved and what is natural. We wanted to ride elephants, hang out in bars where you could still smoke beneath slow-turning fans, drive along the endless arrow-straight roads to the floodplains of the Tonle Sap Lake, eat fat shrimps in villages which had survived through the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, but no-one had told us about the people, how kind, placid and forgiving they were. No other country in the world could have survived so many horrors and still have found such power to forgive. It didn’t make sense to me, but then I come from a land that specialises in Christian vengeance.
It was our first visit to Southeast Asia, and we immediately fell in love with the place.
Siem Reap was little more than a dusty crossroads crowded with ringing bicycles, lined with cafes and little places where you could get a foot and shoulder massage. There were covered markets at each end of the town selling intricate wooden carvings, pirated books and gaudy silks, and barns where farmers sat on the floor noisily trading their produce, with their kids running everywhere, laughing and fooling around, the closest definition I’d ever seen of real community. That’s a word we’re fond of using at home, but there it means something entirely less friendly.
After watching Chinese dealers testing precious stones that had been dug out of the mountains, running little blowtorches over gems to prove their integrity, I bought Dorothy a ruby for thirty dollars.
‘I’m not going to have this made into anything,’ she said happily, ‘I just want to keep it somewhere in a box so I can look at it and remember.’
Instead of frying ourselves by the hotel pool we wandered around the streets, where every merchant was calling out, trying to lure us in
to their store with special offers. Not so pushy that they were annoying, just doing business and quickly leaving us alone as soon as they realised we didn’t want to buy. Now that Cambodia was finally stable, the Russians and the French were competing to build along the town’s main road, and ugly concrete blocks were going up behind the 1930s colonnades. No plumbing, no drainage but plenty of internet access; welcome to the new frontier, where you could use an ATM machine but still had to step over duelling scorpions to do so. A national museum had opened, absurdly high-tech, half the interactive exhibits not functioning, as though some rich outsider had insisted that this was what the town needed to draw tourists. Less than a decade of peace and the nation was embracing its future with a kind of friendly ferocity, but you feared for the transition process, knowing that everything could still be lost overnight.
And I was finally vacationing with my wife. Gail and Redmond had married and left home and were now living in Oakley, Virginia, which left me and Dorothy rattling around the house in Washington with too many bedrooms and memories. I’d been promising Dorothy that we’d eventually travel, but it proved harder to get away from work than I’d expected. After thirty-seven years of marriage, during which time we’d hardly ever left the country, I decided enough was enough and applied for two months’ leave, although I eventually had to take it unpaid. Of course, whatever time you pick to go away is never the right time, and this proved to be the case; there was an election pending and everyone was expected to help, but Dorothy put her foot down and told me she’d go by herself if I didn’t step away this time and make good on my promise to her. She said, ‘Politicians are like policemen, the work never stops and they never make much of a difference, so take a vacation.’
So I booked the tickets and off we went.
When I first saw the officials at Siem Reap airport emptying their collected visa-cash into leather suitcases right in front of the tourists who paid them, I’ll admit I thought the worst, that the corrupting influence of past dictators lived on—and maybe it does in other ways—but after that day I saw nothing else like it and we had a wonderful time.
On one of our last trips out beyond the river we found ourselves in a town almost completely surrounded by dense jungle. The Tonle Sap Lake is tidal. For most of the year it’s barely three feet deep, but during the monsoon season it connects with the Mekong River and reverses its flow, flooding the surrounding plains and forests, filling a vast area with breeding fish. The Vietnamese families living in the floating villages at the lake’s edge aren’t much liked by the Cambodians, but on the whole everyone rubs along. The effluvial soil is rich and the landscape is lush with vegetation. On that day we stopped in a village so small that no-one living in it could decide what it was called, and that was when we saw the house.
It was just a white brick box in a small square of cleared grass, but the surrounding forest canopy glowed emerald even at noon, and it looked like the happiest place on earth. What’s more, the little house was available to rent. I mentioned it to Dorothy, who dismissed the idea at once, but I could see she was excited. A light had come into her eyes that I had not seen in years. Dorothy never went out without makeup and jewellery. She cared about appearances, and what people thought of her. She was concerned about making a good impression. It’s a Washington habit. But I could tell she relished the thought of not having to bother, even if it was just for a month.
‘Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a look,’ she said finally, so we visited the owner, a tiny little old lady called Madame Nghor, and she showed us around. It was just about as basic as you can get. There was really just one room with a single small window, because the kitchen and toilet were kind of outside. They stood on a half-covered deck with a wood rail that overlooked the fields and the forest. There was also a plank terrace at the front facing the road. Life was lived mainly out of doors.
The monsoon had recently ended, leaving the jungle green but fetid. On its far side, palms had been cleared to build a factory, but the breeze-block building had never been finished. The village was so perfect that it could even keep progress at bay. Madame Nghor agreed to rent us the property for one month. The price seemed absurdly low, but maybe it was extortionate to her. We didn’t really care.
We checked out of the Borei Angkor, the fancy hotel where we had only met other Americans, and moved right in to the tiny house. When we got in the taxi to leave, the driver automatically assumed we were heading to the airport and very nearly dropped us there. He was real surprised when we redirected him into the countryside.
Our tickets home were open so there was nothing else to do but tell our family that we had decided to stay on awhile. Gail thought we were behaving kind of weirdly but Redmond congratulated us when we told him.
‘I won’t be making many more calls,’ I warned him. ‘The charger we brought with us doesn’t work out here. But we have our health and our money, and the change is doing Dorothy a world of good.’
‘Just don’t go native on us, Dad.’ Redmond laughed.
Obviously, staying in the house was very different to being in the hotel. There were no fresh towels or little gifts on the pillow, and there was no room service or air-conditioning, but we loved it all the same. Madame Nghor offered to prepare food for us, and we took up her kind offer. On our second day, she called around with the other villagers to formally welcome us. The women peeped shyly around the door and wouldn’t come in. The men sat in a circle outside and offered us a strong, sour yellow drink they’d made themselves. I didn’t like it much but it wouldn’t have been right to refuse it.
We were sad to see so many of their children missing an arm or a leg. They danced about dexterously with just a stick or two to lean on, and Dorothy and I felt compelled to give them a few coins even though we knew we shouldn’t. There was this kid called Pran, a skinny little runt about seven years old, who had lost both his legs and one arm. There were still thousands of landmines buried in the countryside around the village, and we were warned about straying from the marked paths when cycling to the next village for provisions. The damage of war always outlives the fighting, sometimes in ways we can never imagine.
The younger villagers spoke some English, and all were anxious to ensure that we would have a happy stay. Madame Nghor was especially thoughtful, and would bring us small gifts—a mosquito coil, candles, a hand fan—anything she could think of that might make our stay more comfortable. Her husband had died in tragic circumstances—I heard from one of the villagers that he had been murdered by a Khmer resistance unit about fifteen years earlier—and pain was etched deeply in her face, but now her life was simple and safe and she made the best of it; her story, we felt, was to have a happy ending. She and the villagers lived by the principles enshrined by their religion, peace and acceptance and harmony, and we found it a humbling contrast to the way we lived at home. You try to do the right thing but life in the West is complicated and hypocritical.
There were times when we felt like disoriented Westerners, not understanding what we were seeing. On a trip into Siem Reap we watched a fight explode out of nowhere between two men who were whisked away so quickly by police that I feared for their survival in the cells. Then, an hour later, we saw them in a café together laughing and drinking. Some of the food gave us fiery stomach cramps—we weren’t used to eating such quantities of spiced vegetables without any dairy products—and the insects particularly plagued Dorothy, who would find herself bitten even though she tightly wrapped herself at sunset from head to foot. One night as I watched this ritual of protection, I found myself fearing for her. She seemed so much more fragile here. Dorothy caught me looking, and told me not to fuss. She always had confidence in me.
The bugs were at their worst after a humid rainstorm broke across our new home one night. They flew into the shutters at such a lick I thought they might crack the wood. The next morning the warm, still pools under our decking were filled with giant centipedes and every type of crawling creature, some
with pincers, some with horns and stingers, many as big as an adult fist. I shifted one multi-legged horror from the bedroom with a stick, and it caught me by surprise when its shiny black carapace split open and two vibrating iridescent green wings folded out. It lifted lazily into the air like a cargo plane, and I guided it toward an open window.
The following evening we opened a bottle of warm red wine and sat beside each other on the rickety wooden terrace, watching the sunset, Dorothy and I. Silence fell easily between us, but it was also a time for asking things we had avoided discussing all of our married life.
‘Tell me,’ she said after a long pause for thought. ‘Do you ever regret working for the doctor?’
It was a question I had asked myself many times. ‘I was young,’ I replied. ‘I was ambitious. We were denied information. We didn’t know many of the things we know now.’
‘But if you had known, would you still have worked for him?’
‘Why do you need to know?’
‘Because there were others who stood their ground.’ There was no reproach in her voice.
‘They knew more than I ever did. He kept us in the dark.’
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 33