Phan sat up on his elbows and looked for the eleven billionth time at the celestial error between his legs, hoping that overnight it might have made up its mind. This way or that? One or the other?
His mother had made that call early on in his life. She’d thought the little dresses and pink ribbons from the missionary’s sewing box might prod her son/daughter off the fence.
“But she’s getting so tall,” dumb Father had said. “The face isn’t a girl’s at all.”
Mother ignored him. She persevered. She even coached her only child in the arts of womanhood.
A mockery at school.
Every single waking day a nightmarish humiliation.
Swimming through rocks.
The word “Miss” was on his national identity card so this gawky, hairy-chinned female, still in his mother’s pink ribbons, waded uncomfortably through life to the age of fourteen. And then, all at once, the strings snapped.
There was a war on. Neighbors were shocked but not particularly surprised to find the husband and wife hacked to death in their own home with a machete. The odd daughter was missing, presumed violated and dead. And Phan’s life began. It was an awful, violent period in Laos, but his country wasn’t unused to such brutality. There were unnecessary deaths and, in the confusion, identities became vacant. Phan began his metamorphosis, stepping out of one skin and into the next and the next, becoming more confident with each shedding. He tried on other men’s lives as if he were trying on shirts at the market. He was a patriot fleeing the Royalists, a deserter escaping from the Reds, a pacifist seeking refuge from aggression. With each stage he deliberately became more of a man in his own mind. And to complete the transition—to prove that he had been meant to be male all along—he decided to take a wife.
He knew how to talk to girls. He’d been one. He’d heard them gossip and understood what they expected. He was in Luang Nam Tha in the north, living the life of a man whose papers he’d taken: a man who lay wounded on a battlefield. After learning a little about his family and history Phan had finished him off with a bayonet. In the skin of this man, Phan had met a girl. She was beautiful and innocent and so in love with him he could sense the warmth emanate from her body when they were close. He felt something for her too, although he wasn’t sure what to call it. He believed, somewhere in his confusing emotional spin drier of a soul that this was the solution to the puzzle. Everything would find its true place once he became a husband.
The ceremony had been simple: sweet, and low-key with only her close friends and relations. He’d charmed them all. They loved him. They’d set aside a room for the newly married couple behind the family house. It was a simple thatched building. As sound traveled unimpaired through bamboo the parents had arranged to be discreetly absent.
Phan had planned it in his head. It was to be a slow, romantic night. As they held each other in the lamplight he would explain his circumstances. She might be a little surprised, but she would hear him out. After a moment of thought she would tell him that she loved him for himself—that everything else was unimportant.
But the drink had turned her mind. As soon as they were alone, she tore at his clothing like some wild beast. He held her off, tried to engage her in conversation, but she seemed unnaturally obsessed with his body. “Very well,” he thought, “let her see me. That might work just as well.” But first she touched him between the legs, then she sat back to look, and her mouth fell open. She ceased her attack and fell backward against the wall of the building. The posts and beams shuddered. It was the mocking expression on her face, not the subsequent laughter that left a scar branded on his soul and closed down his heart. It was a look of disgust—one that he would see in the eyes of every woman he met from that day forward.
He’d strangled her to death that night there in her parents’ back room. He’d driven his medical supply truck a hundred kilometers south to the outskirts of Nam Tha, parked beside the highway, and carried her body into the undergrowth. It was all over. But as he headed into the town in search of a new battlefront and a new identity, thoughts of his untouched bride flooded his mind. She was his. In the eyes of the Lord Buddha and the Royalist government, she belonged to him. She’d sworn her devotion. He had the paperwork to prove it. The fact that she was dead didn’t terminate that contract. He could still have the honeymoon he’d imagined in his dreams.
It took him most of the day to put together the equipment and supplies he needed. When he found her again he was dismayed to discover her body so ravaged by nature in such a short time. But it didn’t matter. He wined and dined her, told her his secret, and at last, he gave her the pleasure she’d so obviously craved. He tied her to a tree with ribbon and, as he sat naked admiring his new bride, he became aware of a powerful joy that had welled up inside him. He had never experienced such elation. The feeling was deep in his groin, exactly as he’d always imagined it to be. He had experienced some kind of sexual pleasure. He was complete.
That seemed far in the past to him now. There had been so many disruptions since then. Political changes were being made all around him. After the cease-fire in ’72 he moved to Vientiane and adopted an identity nobody could question. A lot of new people were arriving and leaving each day. The Royalists could see the inevitable Red sun dawning on their empire and, one by one, they slipped across the river, unannounced, under cover of darkness. Phan had merely stepped into the shadow one of them left behind. He found work, did well, and as good men were hard to find in the empty city, he was offered a position with the Census Department. It was ideal: travel, anonymity, a veritable factory of documentation. Everything was set for him to prove his masculinity again and again without fear of discovery.
He had wrested possession of the truck from the imbecile and left him doing some inane, unnecessary task. Phan would spend this night here in the bridal suite remembering each detail of the honeymoons he’d enjoyed with his five wives and the pleasure he’d given them. He’d dream of tomorrow’s wedding and the seduction of the bright and beautiful teacher, Wei, and he’d sleep the sleep of a man—a real man.
Phosy drove into Natan at 9 p.m. He stopped once or twice to ask directions to the house of the resident government cadre, but it wasn’t really that difficult to spot: the largest wooden building on the main street. They parked opposite and stepped down from the jeep to stretch like waking cats. It had been a bone-jarring ride, and they were exhausted. For Phosy it had been a day of particularly slow hours. The administrator came out of his house before they could knock or shout hello. He was a young man relying on one or two chin hairs to lend him an air of authority.
“Can I help you, Comrades?” he asked. Phosy and the policemen showed him their identification papers.
“We are here on a very serious police investigation,” Phosy told him. “We need to contact the team collating the census data immediately.”
“You mean immediately now?” the cadre asked.
“Unless you know of any other type of immediately.”
“Well, that might be a problem.”
“Why?” asked Phosy.
“The census people did pass by earlier, and they presented their credentials. But after they left here they were due to split up. They said they’ve got data to collect from twenty districts in two days. The only way they can do that is to set up three bases to make it more convenient for the collectors to get to.”
“Presumably they told you where they’d be based?”
“My deputy, Comrade Sounthon, organized it for them. But he’s off on a night hunt with the locals. You know? Headlamps, shooting possums and other nocturnal game.”
“Animals too drowsy to run away,” Daeng remarked.
“Does anyone else have any idea where we can find the census collators?” Phosy asked.
“One or two people, Comrade Inspector, but they’re all out on the hunt.”
“Damn.”
“Have you had an old fellow on a motorcycle here this evening asking the same que
stion?” Daeng asked.
“Not that I’ve heard, Auntie, and I hear most things.”
Daeng involuntarily squeezed Phosy’s arm.
“What time are you expecting your deputy back?” the policeman asked.
“Sunup usually.”
Phosy looked at his weary passengers.
“All right. Then we could use a few hours’ sleep. Can I trouble you for accommodation?”
“Guesthouse is just around the corner, Comrade. Turn left at the tire repairers.”
What the cadre had described to be the cheapest rooms in the province had every right to be. The kapok mattresses smelled of sweat and worse, and the stuffing had coagulated into lumps. The patter of tiny feet on the tin roof hinted at an all-night squirrel hoedown. Phosy had long since given up the thought of sleep. He sat on the veranda steps drinking weak tea from the communal thermos and waited for the sun. He hadn’t said anything to Daeng but he was worried about Siri. Out here they weren’t far from the Thai border. Rebels occupied the hills and insurgents crossed the river to create havoc. Bandit gangs and renegade gunmen often hijacked lone vehicles. A Triumph motorcycle in good condition would be quite a catch. He hadn’t thought to ask at the police boxes they’d passed whether they’d sighted the doctor, and now, deprived of sleep and mad at everyone, he imagined all the fates that might have befallen his friend.
“Can’t sleep, Inspector?” Phosy turned his stiff neck to see Daeng behind him in the candlelight. She came to sit beside him on the step, and he poured her tea.
“The kids up too?” she asked.
“No, they’re made of putty. They could sleep on a pile of jackfruit.”
“Jackfruit sounds quite comfortable compared to the beds in there.”
The indigo sky had begun to pass through less depressing hues on its journey to blue, and the sounds of happy voices hummed in the distance.
“I wonder if that’s our hunting party returning,” Phosy said.
“I do hope so. I would like to get away early.”
Phosy smiled. “Oh, no, Madame Daeng. You blackmailed your way onto the jeep yesterday. You aren’t going to get away with that again.”
“Inspector, you wouldn’t leave a girl alone in the wilds?”
“There’s a good restaurant on the main street. You can swap noodle stories with the owner. This is a police inquiry, not a tour. You’ll stay in town and we’ll pick you up on our way back.”
“You’re sure you can’t use an extra gun?” She patted her fat purse.
“If I thought for a second you’d brought a weapon with you, I’d have you in handcuffs right now.”
“Why didn’t I get offers like that before I got married?”
“Madame Daeng!”
“All right. I’m joking. I’ll swap recipes and crochet while you’re away doing manly things.”
“Good.”
The voices had become louder now, and a small posse of happy hunters loomed through the morning mist along the unlit street. At first it appeared they were dressed in large animal suits, but it was merely that they were festooned with carcasses. If there was a more frightening gallery of rare, beautiful, and bleeding creatures, Daeng hadn’t seen it.
“Have a successful night, boys?” she called.
“Fantastic, auntie,” said one.
“Half of them just fell out of the trees from the shock of hearing gunshots,” said another. They all laughed.
“Bravo,” she clapped.
“Which one of you is Sounthon?” Phosy asked.
A short, plump man wearing a lei of big-eyed lorises stepped forward. “I am.”
“Well, I’m Inspector Phosy from National Police Headquarters, and I need the locations of the three census takers.”
“Comrade,” the man laughed, “I’ve just come back from …”
“Look! I don’t care whether you’re just back from the northern front full of bullet holes. I want the locations and I want them ten minutes ago.”
Sounthon had arranged accommodation for the visitors in three villages that were central to the collection zones. They were thirty kilometers apart and formed a perfect triangle on the map. But the deputy had no information as to which collector was staying at which location. They’d have to go and see for themselves. Phosy and the two young officers were nine kilometers from the first site, a village called Ban Noo. It was only the absence of vegetation and a thin layer of sand that distinguished the road from the surrounding landscape. The journey had been more rock than roll.
“What do we do if he’s there?” asked one of the fearful officers.
“We talk to him,” Phosy said, concentrating on keeping the jeep on the track. “We ask a few pertinent questions. We check out his attitude. We say we’re just making a few inquiries and we’d like his cooperation. We start with things like work, his routines, marital status, family—the usual. Then we hit him with something direct like, ‘Have you ever met a woman called Ngam in Ban Xon?’ We look into his eyes and see if there’s a reaction. And we take it from there.”
“Then we shoot him,” came a voice. Madame Daeng’s smiling face loomed in the rearview mirror as she rose from behind the backseat. Phosy slammed on the brakes and ran into a tall clump of swollen-finger grass. All three men turned to see her, large as life, clutching the roof.
“Madame Daeng? What the … ?” Phosy yelled.
“I told you I could scrunch up to almost nothing,” she smiled.
“But where were you?”
“Under the tarpaulin behind the backseat.”
“There’s barely ten centimeters down there.”
“I’m pliable.”
Phosy was furious. “Get out!” he said.
She laughed. “What, here?”
“I told you to stay at Natan.”
“You want me to walk all the way back there on my arthritic legs?”
Phosy hammered his fists against the steering wheel.
“Madame Daeng, if you were a man I’d punch you on the nose, I swear I would.”
“If you did, even if I weren’t a man, I’d punch you back.”
The young officers laughed.
“You two can wipe those smiles off, right now.”
“Listen, son,” she said, “believe me, I can help. If I thought I’d hamper your investigation I wouldn’t have come. Really I wouldn’t.”
“I know your history. But that was …”
“Then you know I can only be an asset. Siri’s up here somewhere and, brave as he is, I want to be around to … to support him. That’s what couples do. And, Phosy, a steering wheel can only take so much abuse.”
Phosy gave one last punch then put his hands on his head. He knew when he was beaten.
“Let this be a lesson to you boys,” he said to the policemen. He left it there, and they didn’t ever learn what the lesson was. Phosy reversed out of the grass and drove in silence to Ban Noo.
Comrade Ying Dali, the one-time North Vietnam region 6 boxing champion, now gone to seed, sat beneath a camouflaged tarpaulin receiving piles of paper from two colorful characters: one with a cheroot hanging from her lip, the other with a crossbow strapped to his back. Phosy killed the overheated engine and watched.
“According to Siri’s description, he’s one of the two junior officials,” Daeng said. Phosy kept quiet.
They waited until the boxer was alone before strolling across to him. They were in a village so basic the main house was a thatch of twigs. They were well-plaited twigs but really nothing to stop a good wolf puff. It was a picturesque place with a stream, like an illustration for a month on a calendar: heaven, unless you had to live in such an isolated place with no power or sanitation or medicines. The boxer stood when the strangers reached his lean-to.
“Comrades?” he said.
Phosy introduced himself and his men, ignoring Daeng completely. He announced that they were investigating a murder in the district. It was a small untruth only in that the offense had not yet taken plac
e. He hoped he wasn’t tempting fate.
“Can you tell us exactly how your system here works?” he asked Ying.
“Well, it’s quite simple,” Ying began. “We draw up an area into grids. We come in and identify literate people. We pay them a few kip, and they take our questionnaires off to the surrounding minority villages. We come back two weeks later, and they bring us the results. We check that everything’s in order, pay them the rest of their fees, and give the documents to the section head to collate.
“Comrade Buaphan?” Phosy asked, consulting an imaginary list in his notebook.
“That’s right.”
“How do you get them to him?”
“Depends. If he’s busy he sends the driver. But he prefers to drive himself. He’s a bit touchy about his truck.”
“And is that the only communication you have—the truck? I mean you don’t have walkie-talkies or such?”
“No, they don’t work over these distances, and the mountains block shortwave signals as well. So we rely on the truck to ferry messages back and forth.”
“So for long periods you wouldn’t know what the other two men are up to, whether they’re at their bases or not?”
“Well, that’s true. But I mean, we can tell. If the work’s not done we know who’s been slacking off. Comrade Buaphan’s always efficient.”
“Do you know anything about Comrade Buaphan’s personal life?” Phosy asked.
“No. He’s a bit of a loner. When we aren’t on the road—I mean, outside office hours—we never see him.”
“Does he have family?” Daeng asked from her rearguard position out in the sun. Phosy turned and glared at her.
“He had a wife once, I believe,” the boxer replied. “Somewhere up in the north. She passed away.”
The Merry Misogynist Page 19