“Did he say where he was going?”
“Into town. We always went there at weekends and played around.”
“Was there some place he especially liked?”
“The city offices.”
“Hmm, right. But that day wasn’t a weekend. All the offices would have been open. There were people in them. And if he’d just walked around in his uniform, someone would have stopped him and shipped him back to school, the police especially. Was there some secret place you liked to go? Somewhere you couldn’t be seen?”
“Well …” She shook her head. “No.”
“Mim, it can’t be a secret anymore.”
“I know, but …”
“Mim.”
“Under the new bridge.”
“What new bridge?”
“The one to the airport. It’s not finished yet. They got all these big pipes and bricks and stuff under it. We got a camp there.”
“Do you mind if I go and see it tomorrow?”
“Don’t care. I’m not going there no more, not … not by myself.”
“I know. But don’t you forget what I told you. Sing’s spirit can tell when you’re sad or when you blame yourself. You don’t want to get his spirit depressed, do you?”
“No.”
“Because you’ve never seen anything worse than a depressed spirit. I remember seeing one once. It got drunk and rode its bicycle into a tree.”
She laughed and her face lightened. “Spirits can’t ride bicycles.”
“No? Then that must be why it ran into the tree.”
They walked back to the party hand in hand.
Brother Fred
Dtui was frantic with worry. When the sun went down she’d started to work herself into a panic, not sure how long was a suitable time for a young wife to wait before missing her husband. There were head counts by the guards some evenings, spot checks on this or that sector. At seven she’d gone to Bunteuk’s room and asked whether he’d seen Phosy. The chief was seated on the floor with a circle of friends, gambling. He told her he hadn’t seen Phosy all day but that she shouldn’t worry, he was probably just caught up in a discussion somewhere and hadn’t noticed the time. He reminded her there really was nowhere to go.
But by eight thirty she could stay calm no longer. This wasn’t Dtui acting like a wife was expected to. This was Dtui anxious and fearful for her friend’s safety. She went to Bunteuk again and insisted they go to the camp authorities to file a report. Bunteuk assigned the duty to his deputy, Kumhuk, who was none too pleased to be dragged away from the card game. On the way to the Thai office, he told her not to expect much.
There was a form, of course, as there was for everything in Thailand. The policeman on duty filled it out reluctantly and laboriously: names, address, times, type of complaint, details, signatory, witness, time received. Once the form was placed in the in-tray, she’d asked impatiently what the officer planned to do about it. He told her to watch her temper and remember who and what she was. He said her husband would probably turn up drunk at midnight with cheap perfume around his fly like all the other worthless Lao shits.
Her natural response to that comment had earned Dtui a night in the violent residents’ cell, a crude cage at the rear of the police station, ten feet by ten, containing only a narrow wooden bench. Now, at six in the morning, pacing and huffing inside her metal cage like a wild boar, she waited for the day officer to arrive. She could see the night-duty clown chatting with two younger men before one walked back to the lockup. He was good-looking but no less condescending. She took a deep breath.
“Can I go now, sir?” she asked.
“Are you going to cause any more trouble?”
“Tr … ? I came to report my husband missing. Is that causing trouble?”
“No. But punching an officer of the Royal Thai Police force could be interpreted as such.”
She smiled. “I certainly didn’t punch him.”
“He says you did. He’s got a tomato where his nose used to be as evidence.”
“Sir, the mud on my sandals caused me to slip on your concrete floor. I reached out to prevent myself from falling and your man’s nose just happened to be there. An understandable accident.”
The young man laughed and opened the cage door. The bird was about to fly when he grabbed her arm. “Sign!”
He held a letter saying she hadn’t been abused or molested while in custody. It was written in Thai and he didn’t expect her to understand it. She took his pen and signed “Minnie Mouse” in English. He didn’t bother to check.
Dtui’s cramped legs took her as fast as they could to her room. It was empty, the bedding untouched, nothing had been moved. She lay on the thin mattress and breathed heavily.
“Think, Dtui, think.”
She couldn’t act rashly or make accusations because it was possible that Phosy’s disappearance was all part of his acceptance by the resistance. She couldn’t damage his cover. All she could do was fuss like a wife alone in a refugee camp whose husband had vanished. If her actions brought too much attention to the camp’s covert activities she was sure someone would invite her to join a volleyball team.
She walked in the direction of Court Four, stopping at each corner to describe her husband and ask whether anyone had seen him. At the court she sat on a bench, looking out at the soft clay that didn’t boast one single footprint. A stray black ridgeback came to sniff at her feet.
“What would I do, dog?” she asked. “What would I do if I loved my husband? Who would a desperate housewife turn to?”
Twenty minutes later she arrived at the whitewashed facade of the office of the Church of the Christian Brotherhood. Her tears were genuine, her words contrived.
“I lose my husband,” she called in English through the open doorway. When nothing happened she tried again. “My life is finish. I kill myself.” Again there was an absence of movement from inside and she was wondering whether the office might be unoccupied when a young Western man stepped out of the shadows. He was painfully thin and yellowish like bamboo in a bad year. His hair was an orange mop and he wore clothes that could only have been donated to a charity store.
“What are you saying out here?”
To a Lao whose English had arrived courtesy of dense American textbooks and the odd BBC World Service broadcast, his Irish accent was totally incomprehensible. She enunciated slowly, hoping her clarity would encourage him to improve his own English.
“My husband is loss. Please help me.”
“Do you have an appointment? he asked.
It was Dtui’s uncontrollable torrent of tears that made the man forgo his timetable and escort her inside. Brother Fred was just a young man entrusted with the administrative duties of an interdenominational mission. He’d gone straight from the seminary to a church office. Souls weren’t his speciality. Technically, Dtui was the first victim he’d had to deal with directly, the first refugee who’d spoken to him without the filter of a local Christian interpreter. But on this day adversity had confronted him face to face and he found himself with an obligation. Despite her tears and his language problem, they were able to piece together the story, and the young servant of the Lord agreed to help her find Phosy.
It didn’t take long for Dtui to realize she’d probably have been better off without him. He’d marched her with great bluster into all the Non-Governmental Organization offices and before all the Thai government representatives and told them that this poor woman had lost her husband. But Dtui had noticed their undisguised yawns. So, while he sat in the camp administration center trying to get a call through to the Vatican or some such place, she backed away and left him fondling his worry beads.
She returned to Area Thirty-four, rechecked her own empty room, and found Bunteuk’s house deserted. None of the neighbors had seen his young wife since the previous day. Bunteuk was off at the weekly camp coordination meeting, they told her. Once more she retraced Phosy’s steps to Court Four and sat on the bench by the
bamboo fence. Her dog friend was still where she’d left him. He came to sit by her.
“Either he came here,” she said, “or he was kidnapped on the way. Unlikely in a busy camp at ten in the morning. So let’s say he arrived and sat right here. There were no volleyball players so getting him here had to be a ruse. Why here?”
There was only one logical reason. This had to be an established escape route from the camp. She stood on her bench and was still four feet from the top of the bamboo. Phosy could have made it but it would have taken a front-end loader to get Dtui over. She climbed down and watched the dog scratching at the fence a few yards away. He looked up at her and continued to scratch as if he wanted to be let out. Dtui walked along the fence testing the slats. All of them were nailed and firm until she reached the dog. The fencing there didn’t give way exactly but it felt suspended rather than attached. She squeezed her fingers between the slats until she had enough grip to pull them forward. The dog’s excited reaction told her he was used to getting in and out this way.
The fence swung forward on some kind of hinge and the dog raced out through the gap at the bottom. It was only three-quarters of a Dtui wide, but a lot of her was soft and malleable and she was able to squeeze herself through it like a jellyfish through a mailbox slot. On the outside she readjusted herself and breathed heavily. She’d just illegally left a refugee camp. Dtui was an escapee. It was all rather exciting. She had no idea what she was likely to achieve through this folly but it felt so much better to be active. It was certainly better than following Brother Fred around. Perhaps a wife would go to these lengths to find the man she loved.
She looked around her. She was in a clearing. Most of the surrounding forest had been massacred to build the camp. She imagined the upheaval this must have caused to the tree spirits and wondered whether Thai Phibob were as vengeful as those in Laos. Just one scrawny tree stood in the center of the cleared land. It was obviously too gaunt and gnarled to offer up useful timber. It was twisted and warped like some haunted tree in a myth. But despite its deformities, its foliage was thick and rich and its seedpods had begun to crack and distribute their booty to the land. The insides of the split pods were bright scarlet, and, from a distance, it looked as if the mother tree had bled to produce her young.
Dtui walked closer and took hold of one pod. It filled her hand. She looked at it with astonishment. It had the most human characteristic she’d ever seen in a plant. The edges of the pod rounded into the shape of the lips. At their convergence, a bud, moist and ripe, formed the clitoris. And opposite, where the pod joined the stem connecting it to the tree, was a dark channel. In obstetrics, Dtui had handled many such organs, but they’d all been attached to females—Homo sapiens females. In her hand she held a genuine …
“That’s a yonee peesaht,” said a deep voice from behind her. She jumped guiltily and turned to see a smiling old man in a large cowboy hat carrying a slingshot. “The Devil’s Vagina, they call it. Knocks your kneecaps right off, don’t it?”
He didn’t seem at all flustered in the presence of an escaped illegal alien. Something about his arsenal sug gested he wasn’t a bounty hunter.
“It’s incredible, she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It always gives newcomers a chuckle the first time they see one. There used to be a lot more around here. They say the young fellas stole so many pods for you-know-what that there weren’t enough seeds left to keep the species going. Don’t know if it’s true, mind.”
Dtui laughed. “Uncle, I wouldn’t be surprised if you just made that up yourself.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised by that either.”
Their language was identical, their bond instant. It was only the Mekhong that prevented the two from sharing a nationality. The river cut through the center of a Lao community with one history and one culture. It should have been a main artery rather than a dividing line. But rivers are often assigned the unpleasant duty of marking a border. A million Lao awoke one day to find they were Thai. The waterway that had once united now separated families and made them unwilling enemies. There was no going back. Only by draining the Mekhong and filling it in would the Lao race ever be reunited.
“What are you hunting?” Dtui asked.
“Rabbits. Stringy little bastards they are around here, but we don’t stand a chance of catching anything better with all them hungry scumbags next door.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the bamboo fence.
“Do you live around here?” she asked. She’d started to walk beside him across the denuded land.
“Over yonder. Just a little hut, but I was born there, so it’s home.”
“So, you remember when the Americans were here.”
“Sure do,” he said in English, squeezing the brim of his hat. “Where do you think I got this from?”
“And they say this whole camp used to be their armory storage ground.”
“Armory and camp. That’s why they needed so much land. They had to keep a space between the houses and the bombs, just in case. All this land we’re walking on used to be inside the camp. The fence was once way over there.” He pointed to the far side of the clearing.
“You mean they made the refugee camp smaller?”
“Yeah. Odd, isn’t it? It spreads out in every other direction the more it fills up, but they don’t touch this bit here. It must be because of the A-bomb.”
“What A-bomb?”
“The Americans had their A-bombs stored here and the radiation killed the land and made it dangerous.”
“Who told you that?”
“The soldiers.”
“American soldiers?”
“No, Lao. They told the wife and me not to come over here after dark. They said the radiation’s worse at night.”
“You saw Lao soldiers here?”
“Yeah.”
“In uniform?”
“They didn’t need to be in uniform. I can tell.”
“So you don’t come here at night. And you believe this radiation story.”
“Not really. But if a bunch of boys with guns tell me not to hang around at night, I’d believe anything they told me. Wouldn’t you?”
“One last question.”
“Are you with the radio?”
“Eh?”
“We listen sometimes, when we can get batteries. We listen to the women on Lao radio. They all talk nice like you. Are you a reporter?”
“Kind of. Last question: Did they—I mean the Americans—did they store all their weapons in the open air?”
“Most of ’em. They covered ’em with camouflage netting and leaves and stuff. But some they put in the cellars.”
“You wouldn’t remember where those cellars are, would you?”
“No, never seen ’em. I only know about ’em cause my nephew used to porter for the Americans. That’s how I got my hat. Like it?”
“It’s lovely.”
Dtui sat sweating in the shade of the Devil’s Vagina tree. It seemed to give off more heat than it stopped. She’d walked every inch of the clearing stamping her feet—expecting a clunk, but getting nothing. There had to be something here. Siri had mentioned the tree in his note and its name was code for the operation. Phosy had disappeared from a spot just inside the fence. There had to be a connection and it had to be at this place.
She’d been sitting contemplating for an hour when the earth moved. A piece of sod rose from the ground some thirty yards in front of her. It was a foot thick and beneath it was a head she recognized belonging to Mr. Kumhuk, the deputy section chief. He checked in all directions, obviously confused Dtui for a shadow, and threw the block of earth to one side. He pulled himself out of the ground, replaced the divot, and sprinted to the fence, where he vanished through the gap.
Dtui hurried over to where Mr. Kumhuk had emerged but she saw no obvious entrance. There were tufts of grass and rocks but no lines or handles. Then she saw it, a slight discoloration of the vegetation, a small area of deliberat
e landscaping. She grabbed a handful of grass and realized straightaway that it was fake, some kind of synthetic material. She pulled with all her might and was able to lift an uneven area of ground surprisingly easily. She shoved it to one side and looked down. Another black hole in the ground. Hadn’t she had enough of those? She seemed to have a magnetic attraction to eerie confined spaces. Earlier in the year she’d almost died from heading blindly down a dark tunnel. Oh, well. Que sera sera.
She picked out the steps with her feet and lowered herself down gradually. The stairway was concrete and led deep inside the earth. She was already feeling claustrophobic by the time she saw the breaker switch at the foot of the stairs. She pushed the handle up and banks of fluorescent lights flicked on one by one across a vast concrete silo. There were tables and camp beds and hundreds—perhaps thousands—of enormous crates. Banks of artillery lined the walls as well as uniforms in neat piles. This was the home base for the Devil’s Vagina insurgents; there was no doubt in her mind. There was also no doubt that the Thais had rebuilt the camp boundary wall so no prying United Nations officials would stumble across this nest of vipers inside a supposedly neutral camp. The Thais were in on it. No surprise there. The Thai military was riddled with Red paranoia. And there was enough American memorabilia around to suggest the U.S. wasn’t about to lose the war gracefully either. Dtui doubted the Americans had merely forgotten to take it all with them.
There were no side rooms or annexes. This was one slab of space. An area had been set aside for planning. Chairs with hinged writing trays stood in rows facing a large blackboard, and various pin boards of maps and charts written in Lao stood on easels. She wondered what the best course of action might be. Grab as many documents as possible and make a run for it? To where? She was forty miles from the nearest point on the Lao border. How far was she likely to get? She couldn’t memorize all the names and dates. She couldn’t even remember how to calculate lost calories. Perhaps she should just set fire to the place and blow it all to hell. That might slow them down long enough to get word to Siri and Civilai in …
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