Anarchy and Old Dogs

by Colin Cotterill

  “At this rate the hair will have grown back naturally by the time we get anywhere.”

  “More haste, less speed. Remember the hare.”

  “I seem to recall the tortoise died of old age before he reached the finish line.”

  In a city with so few cars, the green army jeep that tailed theirs was never likely to blend into traffic. The only way Civilai could fail to notice it was by being in a Willys with no rearview mirrors, which indeed he was.

  They found the only hairdressing salon open before eight. The waxen-faced girl who ran it assured Siri she could reweave the plait but she’d have to make it shorter by some three inches. The hair string was wound and knotted tightly through the loop of the amulet, and Siri’s instructions from the amulet maker had been that the hair and the pendant should never part company. Their blessings were intertwined. He had no choice therefore but to leave both at the shop. The girl told him it would be ready that evening and hesitantly suggested a price of two hundred kip. Siri gave her his most charming smile and told her if she did a good job, it would be worth even more.

  Ten minutes later, the jeep pulled up into a bush in front of the Champasak palace. What little brake fluid there was had been used up at the hairdresser’s and Civilai had adopted the tactic of finding something soft to crash into. They sat in their seats and gazed up at the gargantuan monstrosity that loomed over them: Prince Boun Oum’s Disney castle. It was five stories of would-be splendor: a central block with two ornately tiered wings. It was unpainted, unfurnished, and unlovely.

  “It looks like something you could make with playing cards,” Civilai suggested.

  “Let’s hope it’s sturdier than that.”

  There was an enormous wooden double door at the top of the front steps, the type you’d expect to find a huge knocker hanging from, but it was unadorned, not so much as a keyhole. Perhaps that was why they were surprised to find it locked.

  “Anybody home?” Civilai yelled. In fact, there was no glass in any of the three hundred windows, so if there had been anyone home they would already have heard the jeep chug up the driveway and smash into the bougainvillea. “Nobody home,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “Let me try,” Siri said. He hammered on the door and shouted, “We know you’re in there. I’m Dr. Siri from the Department of Justice and I have a warrant to search these premises.”

  Civilai laughed. “I hope you aren’t planning to tell them to come out with their hands up. You don’t really expe—?”

  There was a subtle click from somewhere behind the huge door and one side creaked open. Standing there in the shadows was a couple, late middle-aged, dowdy, and stooped. Surprisingly, they were holding hands. Couples rarely held hands in Laos unless they were drunk. The man looked as if he’d just woken from several months of hibernation, during which time he hadn’t eaten. His features seemed to be draped loosely on his face. The rest of him was built like a wire coat-hanger sculpture. The woman’s skin was the color of ash; her eyes no more than hyphens.

  “Sorry,” she said, “we were out back.” She had a voice like someone with long fingernails sliding off a tin roof.

  “You’re the caretakers?” Civilai asked.

  “Sort of,” she replied. The male simply glared at the two old men, grinding his teeth.

  “We look after things,” she continued. “When it was empty, a lot of the stuff … disappeared. All the tiles went, the balustrades. If we hadn’t moved in when we did there’d probably be nothing left at all by now.” Siri wondered whether that would be such a bad thing.

  “So you’re the government then,” she said.

  “Not all of it,” Civilai replied. “We’ve just come to have a look around. Won’t keep you long.”

  They edged warily past the glaring man and found themselves in an empty vestibule. It was impressive that such a large edifice could make so little of space. It was a building site that didn’t make any promises of better things to come. They walked up the wide staircase to the open-air second and third floors.

  “They didn’t get around to putting in rooms, I see,” Siri said.

  The woman was at his shoulder, still holding on to the hand of her partner.

  “The prin—I mean the original owner—wanted it like this, no rooms, just wide open spaces,” she said. “Just five big areas like the palaces in Europe. It would have looked so beautiful if they … if production hadn’t been halted.”

  “Who pays you to look after it?” Siri asked. “The local government?”

  Her laugh scratched hell out of the tin roof. “No, sir,” she said. “They wouldn’t care what happened here. We’re volunteers. We have friends who put a few francs together to help us out.”

  It was clear to Siri that supporters of the old regime were funding this preservation project. It wouldn’t have surprised him if they expected the good old days to be restored and Prince Boun Oum himself to come riding back into town on his white elephant. Royalists were eternal optimists.

  They’d reached the fourth floor, where wide terraces opened out to the elements on all four sides. At the rear, the Se Don River brushed the skirt of the building before joining the mighty Mekhong. In the distance were the Champasak plains and the slopes of the Bolaven Plateau.

  “The view’s grand, I’ll give it that,” Civilai said, leaning on the balcony. Below them were grounds that would look spectacular with greenery, the makings of a tennis court, a huge water tower, and accommodations, presumably for the menial staff. “Even the gardener’s cottage is bigger than your house, Siri.”

  “Everything’s larger than life,” Siri said. “A reflection of the man’s ego.” He thought he’d spoken softly enough but the woman had bat’s ears.

  “He was a good man,” she snapped. “A kind man.”

  Siri wasn’t about to get into a fight with Royalists. He fumbled around for a change of subject.

  “Your husband doesn’t have a lot to say, does he?”

  “He doesn’t have anything to say. He’s dead.”

  Siri and Civilai looked at one another. Even to a coroner, this was something of a revelation.

  “He … ?”

  “He’s been dead for seven years. This here is my brother. He has problems.”

  “Of course.” A second change of subject was in order. “What’s up there?”

  He pointed to the top floor. The building had tapered to a single round room, the size of a small observatory.

  “Nothing,” she said, too briskly to be true.

  “We have to take a look anyway,” Civilai told her, and started up the exterior stairwell.

  “It’s locked,” she shouted after him, but he continued to climb. The first door he tried proved her wrong. He disappeared inside and Siri followed close behind. The two of them stared transfixed at the domed ceiling. It sported painted scenes from the Ramayana and jungles teeming with badly drawn, wooden wildlife. Around the margin an infinite procession of deformed elephants marched. Their mahouts were wearing hard hats and carrying sledgehammers.

  “They did that,” the woman spat, following them in. “Your people. Beautiful it was, country people riding their elephants to pay respect to the prince. Then your lot came in and painted on the helmets and the blue-collar uniforms. They said it was too bourgeois; it didn’t represent the workers. What, may I ask, is bourgeois about a man riding an elephant? Ruined it, they did. Ruined it.”

  They left the eerie round room, all but Siri. He found himself alone, following the procession of elephants with his eyes, incapable of turning away from them. He stood in the center of the room rotating slowly at first, then faster and faster, the elephants and their proletariat jockeys galloping around the room. The pelmet above the windows took on a life of its own. It became a naga—an unholy serpent. It curled down from the wall as Siri spun and wound itself slowly about him. It curled around his neck and he could do nothing. Tighter and tighter it squeezed until he could no longer catch his breath. He pulled at the thick scal
y skin of his attacker but had no effect on it. He choked and gasped for air that wouldn’t come. He dropped to his knees and felt his skin pulling tight against his skull.

  “What in hell’s name?” Civilai had come back to collect his comrade. “Siri?” He hurried to the center of the room and took hold of the blue-faced doctor. Siri’s hands were clawing at his neck.

  “Get it off,” he wheezed.

  “What?”

  “The …” Siri blinked and looked around him. His breath slowly returned to normal and the dizziness cleared. Once he was in control, he smiled and looked at his friend. “The naga,” he said.

  “You’re seeing naga?”

  “Yes, but it started with pink elephants.” He laughed and used Civilai to help himself to his feet.

  “Brother, if I had hangovers like yours I wouldn’t touch another drop. That I promise you. Are you all right?”

  “Fine. Just feeling a bit peculiar. It’s this room.”

  “I know. I felt it, too.”

  “You did?”

  “Bad paintings always make me nauseous.”

  “They are awful, aren’t they?”

  Siri let it go at that and led Civilai to believe he’d had an attack of vertigo from the five-story climb. But he knew the feeling only too well. The Phibob had cornered him without his talisman and, if he’d been alone, they might very well have suffocated him. They had the ability to bluff him to death. He was exposed. His evening hairdresser’s appointment couldn’t come too soon.

  “They took away my livelihood, just like that,” Phosy said.

  He was sitting cross-legged in a circle of ten men. It was a common enough sight, old hands at the camp latching on to the newcomers, getting the latest gossip from back home. They drank Thai rum from mismatched glasses and waited for their food.

  Dtui, being a woman and a wife, was with the other wives at the back of the meeting shelter cooking the food. The women drank, too, but their conversation was about babies and hair and the cost of washing powder, and then more babies.

  “So, Dtui, you and Phosy haven’t managed to get around to it?”

  “No,” she said. “You know how it is. Phosy always said he wanted us to be secure, know what I mean? Be sure our kids could go to school and get a decent education.”

  “Right,” said one woman whose skin was like tree bark. She had a cheroot hanging out of her mouth and the ash dropped onto the cabbage she was deleafing. It wasn’t easy to catch her words. “And you believe that shit?”

  “What do you mean?” Dtui said. She wiped the onion tears from her eyes.

  “Are you sure he’s not just using that as an excuse is what I mean. An excuse not to have kids.”

  “Why would he?”

  “Easier to run away from a woman that’s by herself than from one with a couple of babes in arms.”

  “Leave her alone, Keo,” said a pretty chicken chopper.

  But Dtui was on the defensive. “My Phosy’s a good man,” she said. “A decent man… .”

  “He wouldn’t ever leave me,” Keo said, aping Dtui. This drew laughter from the other members of the lunch detail. “Right. I’ve heard that one before.”

  “You don’t know him,” Dtui said, indignant now. “He’s not like other men.”

  The sound of women’s laughter interrupted the man talk and caused a few smiles in the front room.

  “They’re never happier than when they’re together cooking,” opined the senior section representative, Bunteuk. He was a good deal younger than Phosy. But America’s President Carter’s recent attack of guilty benevolence had led to the making of an agreement to accept a large number of displaced Lao, his former allies, into the United States. This had emptied the camps of many of their longer-term residents and forced younger men into positions of responsibility. Bunteuk had moved up several notches and was now expected to share his wisdom. Phosy smiled at the thought of Dtui in the kitchen discussing vegetables. She’d help serve the men soon, then retire to the back room to wash the dishes.

  That’ll teach her, he thought.

  The camp was a lively place. Thai vendors plied their wares in an attempt to relieve the refugees of the last of their savings or the few dollars they earned by working part-time for the aid agencies. Bored Lao with nothing else to do strolled here and there, chatting, staring, puffing out their cheeks. The International Refugee Committee sanitation trucks kicked up the dust and panicked chickens. Ubon residents with children at their sides wandered up and down the regimented lanes of wooden shacks whispering warnings. “These people are from Laos, darling. This is what communism does to you. Never forget it.”

  Westerners with lists and large sweat stains under their armpits hurried somewhere, always flustered and muttering. The churches and the nongovernment organizations had coordinated their efforts to some extent and created a semblance of order in the Ubon camp. The latrines were sanitary for most of the year, there was always plenty of rice, and a hierarchy of order—from camp liaison officers down to area and street representatives—kept lawlessness to a minimum.

  Money arrived from time to time from relatives who’d already made it to Australia or Europe or the United States, where they were working three shifts cleaning offices or scrubbing grease from Italian casserole dishes through the night to earn enough to restart their lives. For some camp dwellers this pocket money meant a splash of luxury: a bottle of whisky every now and then, an ice cream for the kids, an incentive to the evening guards to allow a visit to the nightspots of Ubon. There were certainly worse places than this old U.S. Army weapons dump in which to be displaced. But even though you could get used to being there, you could never belong. And it was belonging that the refugees at the Ubon camp desperately craved.

  Phosy stretched out his well-fed body in front of the open-air meeting shelter of Section 36. He liked his neighbors. The men had warmed to him. The most difficult part—settling in, being accepted—had been taken care of on this, the first day.

  All he needed now was to keep his ear to the ground and discover how he might get an introduction to the inner core. He already had an idea. He sidled over to Bunteuk and stood beside him, looking up at the ripe clouds.

  “More rain?” he asked.

  “Looks like it,” said Bunteuk. “You’ll hate it when the rainy season sets in proper. This place turns into chocolate mousse, mud up to your knees. All your bedding turns to mildew.”

  “You sound like you’ve been here a while.”

  “Eighteen months next week.”

  “You don’t say? How come you didn’t get on the bus with the last batch of refugees to the U.S.? I hear they took most of the old-timers.”

  “Yeah, they did. Not that easy, though. They did offer us a place but we have to get things settled over there: jobs, community, place to stay. You see, we haven’t got family in America to take us in. I’ve heard of new arrivals starving to death on the street, getting killed by gangs—horrible stuff. I don’t want that for my children. I’m waiting for a placement to Australia. It should come this year. I know people there; it’s safer.”

  “I see. Can’t say I blame you.”

  “Anyway, welcome, Phosy. It’s nice to have you in our section.”

  “Thanks for lunch.”

  “No problem.”

  They shook hands and Phosy watched him walk away. A confident gait; tall, muscular frame: a soldier. A soldier who’d refused the opportunity to get himself and his family out of Thailand and on a plane to freedom. A soldier who wanted to stay close to his homeland.

  * * *

  It was a long drive to Khong on a dirt road apparently engineered by rodents. It was a disaster fittingly numbered Route 13. The drizzle of the previous night had made it slick, so much of the journey was spent traveling sideways. Fortunately, it didn’t have much in the way of hills, so the missing brakes were only an issue on the ferry crossing to Wat Phu. The ferry pilot had apparently lost a few vehicles in the past, so he had two blocks of
four by four ready to chuck under the front wheels just before the Willys vanished off the end and into the muddy water. Siri and Civilai shook his hand with relief.

  It was lunchtime when the old black jeep rolled into Khong, where the name of the Mekhong River had originated. The Mother—the “Me” of Khong—dwarfed the little town. It rolled past triumphantly, making its last stand as a watercourse before being shredded by the four thousand islands of Sri Pun Don. From there, twisted and confused, it was sent tumbling over the Khone Falls. Not even the intrepid French explorers had found a way to blast the river through an obstacle course such as that.

  So here it was, the end of the shipping route. It had once been an impressive city where cargo boats would unload and transfer their wares onto elephants or donkeys to continue down to Cambodia. The colonists had even gone to the trouble of building a short railway line to bypass the falls. But there was little evidence of development now. The train lines lay rusted and overgrown. Modern-day Khong was a huddle of wooden shacks, of fishermen and boat pilots and the odd depressed shopkeeper. Civilai found a good stack of bamboo fish traps in which to park.

  “Do we really need to stop here?” he asked. “I thought we were heading for the falls. Don’t forget I have to drive this thing back.”

  “I could drive if you want a rest,” Siri said, showing remarkable patience at his friend’s constant grumbling.

  “You can’t be serious. I’ve seen how much damage you can cause with two wheels. I dread to think what devastation you could create with two more.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. Cars are safer. You can be lizard-faced drunk in a car and still not fall over.”

  “I rest my case. So, remind me. We’re here because … ?”

  “Because we’re just briefly going to find out where they fished young Sing out of the river.”

  “I knew you had another motive. I should never have believed all that Southern Lao historical heritage bull. I thought we were just here to see the ancient Khmer ruins and the mud-covered capital of the old kingdom, and all the time there you were rushing me through my sightseeing so you could come and show off your do-goodism.”