There came a creak from above that he rapidly assumed had to be the old floorboards stretching out after a day of work. He hurried upward. After the first flight, the steps were coconut wood and they, too, groaned under each step.
He browsed, but didn’t stop, at the first three levels. The moonlight through the odd unshuttered window cast long clawing shadows that unnerved him. But at the fourth floor he was drawn by a sound. It was faint, yet he could tell it had nothing to do with the natural aches and pains of an old building. It was melodic.
He strafed his light across the large central area and shone it into the doorway of each office. All were ajar but one. He walked toward it. The closer he got, the more clearly he heard the sound. It was definitely traditional music. If it were not for the hour, he would have assumed a careless employee had forgotten to turn off her radio. But national broadcasts stopped at nine and, given the current state of animosity, he couldn’t imagine the Thais entertaining their neighbors with Lao country music.
He stood at the door and instinctively reached for a gun he didn’t have. Under a recent directive, inspectors had to apply for weapons from the armory on an “as needed” basis. A total of nine signatures was called for. Uniformed officers still carried guns, but they had to get thirteen signatures if they wanted to put bullets in them. Their weapons were for show. God help them if there was a spontaneous firefight: there were guns everywhere in this country fresh from civil war.
Anyway, what good was a gun against music? He continued to annoy himself with his lack of control. He took a deep breath and threw open the door. His flashlight picked out a desk, a chair, and a cabinet: not a musician in sight. But the refrain was plainly there, hanging in the air. He walked around the desk in search of its source and came to an insulated pipe that ran from the ceiling to the ground. Perhaps in the time of the French it had carried water to the top floors, but the insulation had frayed and at one point the metal had rusted away completely. It left a large gaping hole from which leaked the sounds of a Lao harp, a xylophone, and a pipe.
As the lower floors were silent, he knew the music had to be coming from above. He had a nasty feeling that he knew from which floor. Siri’s warning rang in his ears along with the wooden sounds of the instruments, but this, like it or not, was his duty. He had to lead the men through example. If he didn’t arrive at the station the next day with the contents of the chest, they’d know he was as chicken as the rest of them.
He arrived at the fifth floor just as the moon went out. Where that one huge gray cloud had come from on such a clear night, he couldn’t begin to explain. But he could imagine, and tonight his imagination was by far his worst enemy. The blackness dropped on him like a burned crème caramel, and all his willpower went into keeping the flashlight steady.
His hand trembled as he unlocked the door that would lead him to the top two floors. The tape across the frame was still stuck securely and confirmed that nobody had gone up since the second “accident.” But as soon as he opened the door, that same mournful dirge oozed down the stairwell to greet him.
He took a step back.
“All right. There’s music. So what? Pull yourself together and stop talking to yourself. There’s nothing threatening about music, and there’s likely a very logical reason for it.”
But rack his brain as he did, that reason didn’t come to him. Slowly and deliberately he followed the quivering beam up the stairs to the seventh floor. The discordant strains filled the darkness around him, growing louder and more forceful. He could almost feel the vibrations of the hammers against the wooden tiles of the xylophone.
At the top door he put his hand on the knob and it seemed to shimmer.
“Phosy, you’re a policeman,” he reminded himself and wished to the devil he’d taken the time to collect those nine signatures. “You are not afraid.”
Voices. He heard them clear as anything beyond the door, deep mumbled male voices beneath the music.
“Go back down, Phosy. Go get support. Bring back a unit of men. And tell them what? You heard music? They’d laugh at you. Stop talking to yourself.”
There was only one way to go. He squeezed the doorknob, took one more deep breath, and strode into the room.
Crockery shards crunched beneath his feet, and a scream came from all around him that was no human sound. Although his flashlight was clearly still on, it illuminated nothing. He held it up to his face. The bulb burned brightly but it no longer shed the type of light that could reflect. It had been disarmed.
“What…?”
In the otherwise absolute blackness, four pinpricks of light punctured the dark. His eyes slowly learned to read the blurred shadows in front of him. Each light was a flame on a yellow candle. They formed a square in front of the royal chest. Hidden within a thick fog of taper smoke, two white figures sat cross-legged on the ground. One looked up angrily at the intruder.
“Good God, boy. What kept you?”
Phosy finally took a breath.
“Siri?”
“That’s a relief. I was sure you were already a goner. Get your bum over here. We need one more.”
Phosy crunched over to the misty square of candles.
“I don’t….”
The second white figure was deep in prayer, oblivious to anything else.
“This,” whispered Siri, “is Inthanet. He’s going to open your box for you. Sit yourself down.”
Phosy, still high on fear, took in every detail of the surroundings. The music was playing loudly from an old cassette recorder that sat on the workbench. The play button was obviously faulty. It was taped down with cellophane tape.
Between Siri and Inthanet was a white sheet spread on the ground. It was stained red here and there from the severed head of a pig and a small butcher’s display of other dismembered internal organs. Phosy hoped they were animal. This orgy of blood was set off prettily with bananas and mangosteen and young coconuts, all laid out like decorations on a large wedding cake.
A tray holding a ceremonial banana-leaf cone sat atop the chest. Other leaves fanned out from its base interspersed with ripe banana slices. Four pairs of beeswax tapers, a cut flower, and a stick of magic incense jutted from the cone-like quills. Unspun cotton threads and pungent jasmine hung from the structure as if they’d fallen there by chance.
On the tray base were a silver knife, coins, and several brightly polished stones, and defying gravity at the apex of the cone sat an egg. Phosy had seen similar constructions often at weddings and birthdays and he knew there was to be a basee ceremony. But this one was much fancier than any he’d seen in his life.
“Siri, I….”
“Shush. He’s coming back.”
Inthanet emerged from his prayer trance and seemed to notice Phosy for the first time, even though he’d been staring straight at him the whole time.
“How are you, son?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Not true.
Inthanet took the egg from the cone and held it out to Phosy, who let it lay in his palm. The old man then lit the tapers from each of the four victory candles and held them between his palms. He caused the smoke to waft three times around the basee cone and once around Phosy’s face. He passed the tapers to Siri who repeated the procedure while Inthanet recited a Pali incantation.
After a few minutes, Inthanet took hold of the basee tray with his right hand and Phosy’s egg hand with his left. His eyelids flickered shut. Phosy raised his right hand with his palm facing his right ear. Siri returned the tapers to the cone and rested one hand on each man to complete the circuit. Inthanet continued to chant with a seriousness befitting the situation.
When he re-emerged from his trance, he took a thread from the cone. He dragged it three times across Phosy’s wrist before looping and tying it there. The three men then took strings from the cone and continued to tie them around each other’s wrists until all the thread was used up.
Inthanet, with one final flourish of language, took th
e egg from Phosy, broke it on the ground, and inspected the inside of the shell. It was unstained, almost perfect. He smiled at his co-mediums, and they knew the signs were good. Their leader removed the tray from the chest and laid his palm flat on the lid.
Mumbling quietly to himself, he slowly raised his hand. The lid creaked and lifted with it, as if his palm were a strong magnet. It was evidently powerful enough to raise even the eyebrows of the watchers. When the lid was open and leaning against the workbench, Inthanet looked down into the chest and smiled as if he were greeting old friends.
“So, how have you been, my lovelies?”
He nodded to Siri, who opened a bottle of rice whiskey that had been sitting amongst the road-kill on the sheet. He poured some into a plastic cup and handed it to Inthanet. He in turn knocked back one or two sips before filling his mouth with the remainder. He leaned over the casket and blew out a fine spray of the liquid through tight lips.
“There, that should wake you up.”
Phosy was dying to take a look inside the chest, but he felt too much like a part of the ceremonial display to change his position. However, things soon became clear. While Siri lit a cigarette from one victory candle, Inthanet reached gently into the box and lifted out the leader of the Xiang Thong puppets. He was a pearl-faced prince in once-glittering robes. He was eighteen inches from the tip of his bare feet to the top of his winged helmet.
Inthanet took a second swig of whiskey and sprayed the puppet’s face. It almost seemed to grin with its new shine. Siri had seen this face before. It had been in his dreams. He hadn’t imagined it was a puppet. It had cheered from the roof as the ministry official plummeted to his death. It had danced for him and the king. It had looked down at Siri when he was trapped in the box. He realized now that he had been inside the royal chest looking out through the matte black eyes of these marionettes.
Siri handed the lighted cigarette to the old man, who took a drag and blew smoke into the prince’s face. These indignities were apparently gestures of respect to the puppet spirits. Phosy thought how at-home they would be in some seedy puppet bar. The gesture was repeated lovingly for each of the forty figures.
He called them all by name and passed on funny anecdotes about them to his audience. He told of how the green-faced demon was a devil with the ladies. Once, the troupe had hired a particularly pretty puppeteer. On a number of occasions she would wake up in the morning to find the demon’s white fangs smiling beside her on the pillow. The girl’s door was always locked and there was no way for anyone to bring the demon into her room. She soon deserted the troupe.
Another puppet was a slim dancing girl with a pointed headdress. One day an old puppet master was so carried away with the drama of a scene that he accidentally let go of the puppet’s stick as she was leaping. She soared up to the rafter and was embedded into the wood by her hat. She was soon rescued, but the indignity was too much for the dancing girl. The next morning, they found the puppet master wedged at the top of a tall champac tree with no recollection of how he had gotten there.
One, a smoking puppet, refused to go back into the chest unless he was allowed to take a puff of the cigarette himself with his big cheeks. The cigarette burned bright when it touched his lips and smoke came from the puppet’s ears, even though he was as solid as soap.
Time seemed to be of no importance. When all the puppets were laid out across the workbench in neat rows, Phosy looked at his watch and realized the sun would soon be rising. The cigarettes had all been smoked. Two whiskey bottles lay on their sides empty. The final candle huffed its final sliver of gray smoke just as the lid of the chest was being shut.
“You won’t have any more trouble with them,” Inthanet sighed. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m tuckered out. Can we go home now?”
The Inthanet Connection
The two white-haired men woke in a sweat at noon. It was the devil of a hot day without a whisper of a breeze to be had anywhere. It was the type of day that could wilt a metal gatepost. The only thing preventing Siri and Inthanet from waking earlier was the mental exertion of last night’s ceremony. They were so drained, they could have slept through a house fire.
Siri looked over from his cot, Inthanet from his hammock.
“Hot, isn’t it?”
“Damned hot.”
They smiled and scratched and sat up.
“You’ll be keen to get back to Luang Prabang now, I suppose,” Siri said. In their brief time together, Siri and the old showman had become good friends.
“Not at all. Not at all. I’m sixty-eight, brother, and this is my first time away from the north. This is like winning the provincial lottery. How else would I get a free ride on my first-ever airplane? How else would I get to see the great southern capital and reside in a splendid mansion? This is the most fun I’ve had in decades. We found the puppets and got them settled and we pulled a magnificent fast one over your grumpy neighbor. All fun, Siri. All fun. I intend to drag this out for as long as I can. May even do a bit of sightseeing. In fact, you may never get rid of me.”
“You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. Just let me know when you’ve had enough, and I’ll put you on the flight home.”
“That’s a deal.”
Siri stared at his roommate and seemed to be weighing up just how close their friendship had become.
“Inthanet.”
“Yes, brother.”
“Could I ask a favor of you?”
“Certainly.”
“It’s quite an unusual one.”
“As if this isn’t wholly an unusual trip.”
“Okay. Don’t go away.”
Siri went into the room where he had piled his clothes and fished his flashlight out of his pack. He came back to the cot where Inthanet now sat and plonked himself beside him.
“I want you to count my teeth.”
Inthanet rolled back with laughter. When it eventually subsided and he realized this was no joke, he took the light and shined it into the doctor’s open mouth.
“Wah, you certainly have a healthy looking set there, brother. I’ve lost most of mine, but this is quite a plantation. Do you mind if I use a finger? I don’t want to lose count.”
Siri could only gargle an okay, as the finger was already on the back molar and sliding around to the incisors on the bottom deck.
“But I suppose that’s one of the benefits of living with nature all those years. No sweets to rot your teeth away. I’m a sucker for candy, I am. We used to give sweets to the kiddies who came to the puppet shows, but I ended up eating more than they did.”
Siri wanted him to stop talking and concentrate on the counting. He didn’t know anyone who could do both at the same time with any accuracy. The finger continued to trip along the row.
“I was going to get some of those false ones, but I thought better of it. I mean, you never really knew whose mouth they’d been in before yours or what they’d been chewing on. So I make do with the dozen I’m left with. Yours are beautiful, though. Just gorgeous. Better than a lot of young fellows.”
He pulled out the finger and wiped it on his loincloth. “Sorry, I suppose I really should have washed this before I put it in your mouth. Still, no harm done.”
“Did you count them?”
“Not much point being in there if I didn’t, brother.”
“How many have I got?”
“Thirty-three, brother. Thirty-three.”
“You don’t s…”
“Cooee.” The sound of a woman calling them came not from outside the house, but from the back room a few feet away from where they sat on the porch.
“Anyone home?”
The men looked around to see the annoying Miss Vong in the back doorway.
“Yes, I thought I heard voices.”
“Miss Vong, come in, why don’t you?” Siri mumbled.
“Good morning, Mr. Inthanet.”
“Good morning to you, Miss Vong.”
They exchanged
a warm smile that surprised Siri.
“You two are acquainted?”
“Of course,” she said. “You abandoned the poor man on his first night here. He was all alone. He would have starved to death if it hadn’t been for me.”
“It’s true, Siri. Miss Vong brought me a super home-cooked dinner, and she even cleaned up the place a bit.”
“I’m sure she did.”
“I’ve brought you two lonely bachelors another little treat. I just fixed up a batch of spicy minced fish.”
As she went into painful detail of how she had prepared this unspectacular dish, Siri lamented the ground that had been lost. Over the previous month, he’d triumphantly reduced the number of charity housework invasions to a trickle. Now, Inthanet’s arrival had given her new incentive. Inthanet would have to go.
Her arrival also poured soapy water over his revelation. He had thirty-three teeth: him, Prince Phetsarath, and the Lord Buddha. He wanted to shout it. He wanted to celebrate without Miss Vong.
“Vong, this isn’t the weekend, is it? Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“Not this morning, Comrade. We’re off on a fact-finding mission to the southern provinces. We’ll be traveling overnight, so we’ve got the morning off to pack.”
His spirits rose.
“Will you be gone for many months?”
“Only four days. I’ll be back before you know it. I’ll take this into the kitchen and cover it.” She walked inside with the bowl of fish lahp. In the distance they heard her say “Whoo, this kitchen could do with a good dusting.”
“Not necessary, Miss Vong.”
Siri and Inthanet smiled at each other and made faces as they probably had behind the teacher’s back in primary school. Siri lowered his voice to ask: “What did you do with the dinner she brought you?”
“Not even your dog could get through it. I thought she might check the garbage can, so I gave it a decent burial over there under the papaya tree.”
Thirty-Three Teeth Page 15