That Savage Water

by Matthew R. Loney

  We heard there would be military on the way to the look-out. Is that true?

  On the far side of the valley there’s a barracks. You can see it.

  We heard it was a college.

  You mean the one in Pagan.

  That’s a horrible story… – Jake continues.

  Yes, but go on. You should tell him – Seth says.

  You know you can take a boat from Mandalay to Pagan…

  That’s right.

  On our boat there were soldiers who were escorting a prisoner of some sort. They kept him in a cage on the deck.

  A prisoner of what?

  I don’t know, but there were soldiers guarding him.

  There were two. And they had their rifles. He must have been political. They said they were transferring him to a prison in Pakokku. But it’s a tourist boat, so there’s all these backpackers around him. And an Austrian woman asked one of the soldiers why they were taking him, what had he done.

  She had guts.

  Yes, and listen to this. We’re sitting there, you know, wondering what this was all about. And then Seth here noticed the man was mumbling to himself.

  Mumbling what?

  He was saying something under his breath. We couldn’t understand it at first. But then we started recognizing English words and then realized he was talking to us, but quietly so he wouldn’t get caught. He was being forced to kneel so he couldn’t look at us, but he was saying something about foreigners in Burma…

  That’s right – Seth said – Foreigners must know what’s happening in Burma. That’s what he said…

  He was a professor.

  Right. From the University of Yangon.

  And there was an older French lady who took his picture and passed him food through the bars. She wanted to do something.

  Food?

  She only had some bananas.

  Some Germans tried to give him dollars when the guards weren’t looking, but the prisoner said he couldn’t take the dollars. Said dollars were useless to him in prison.

  He needed kyat.

  But then the guard spotted us and said we shouldn’t give him money. We could give him food, but no money. He had a few thousand kyat tucked under his feet from the French couple but then the soldiers searched the cage and found it.

  They took it from him and told us we could only give him food.

  They spoke English?

  The guards didn’t but we knew what they meant.

  The prisoner actually spoke very well, Seth thought so.

  The guards weren’t happy his English was better than theirs.

  The man could talk to us and the guards couldn’t understand, you see.

  They got angry and put a tarp over the cage.

  It was this big plastic sheet.

  The French couple was really moved. The woman was, wasn’t she, Jake?

  She started crying when they covered the cage with the tarp. She couldn’t help it.

  You couldn’t say anything?

  The Germans tried. But the soldiers said it was their job.

  And the French woman was crying because she couldn’t believe it. She said it wasn’t fair and she couldn’t bear it. We were stuck on the boat, you see…

  Yes – I say – I think so.

  Then the angular guy’s face locks at the doorway. All of us turn as a green-uniformed soldier steps into the restaurant, a slender woman in a longyi traipsing behind him. The patrons are quiet as the officer speaks to the owner then is seated near the far wall, the gazes of the other diners lowering to the plastic tablecloths printed with soccer balls. The officer has the darkened skin of someone who spends his time outdoors, probably in charge of a battalion or two. His forehead appears devoid of creases until it furrows when he looks our direction. The woman’s face is a smug doll with tiny, bitten lips.

  The flashlight is completely dead now. I’d laid it somewhere on the bedding so when I rolled over it dropped to the floor with a cold, cylindrical thud. Hope the bulb didn’t break. I’ll buy new batteries tomorrow if the shops have them. Seth and Jake, both pleasant guys, hiking to Inle in the morning and starting early. My trek to the lookout was stunning. My guide Harry knew everything about the landscape, the bark of the trees, how the water buffalo follow precisely in each other’s footsteps so they won’t break their legs. He knew about the poppy farms near the Chinese border you could only get to by truck – four days into the mountains by road. Knew about how the traders smuggled opium in the rectums of cattle and how the army oversaw it all. We stayed the night at a farm on the lookout and could gaze down into the dusk-filled valley and hear the tea harvesters talking by their distant echoes, their tiny shapes shifting on the far surfaces of the slopes as they picked. The farm grew every kind of food – a sky-forest Eden in perpetual harvest: Squash vines, papayas, citrus, beanstalks, fields of snap peas, marigolds and roses. Goats and squadrons of chickens patrolled the yard. I took a shower using a bucket and cold water from a trough, naked and looking out over the valley as the sun set. Harry said that on a clear day you could see all the way to Mount Popa near Pagan. That’s a hundred kilometres away, I said, and he said yes, but you can see it. A warm wool blanket and dinner waited for me inside the smoky hut and at night the stars pierced through the black canopy – a billion of them, like there were more of them than sky. And they had a depth too; not just a flat surface but a space you could actually see into, like you could tell which of the light had travelled from farthest away. Across the canopy of stars, a satellite drifted like a beacon, white and blinking, tracing the curve of space.

  The officer looks over at us, his thick lips cushioning a toothpick. He leans over and says – You are American, no? Three Americans in Burma…

  We’re British – Jake says.

  Canadian – I say.

  Americans…come to Burma…for trekking – his ruddy face drops, drunk, as if searching the racks of his brain for some lost vocabulary. He calls over to the owner in Burmese and repeats his demand to him. The officer gestures to us.

  Then the owner translates – He say, it very dangerous for everyone in Burma when the foreigner talk about politics…

  No – I say – We didn’t talk about politics. We don’t even care about it really.

  We came for the trekking – Jake says.

  The owner translates back and then from the soldier to us again. His hand trembles beside the pocket of his Levi’s.

  He wants to know where you stay. What guesthouse.

  Don’t tell him that, Jake. He doesn’t need to know.

  The officer pushes his chair back from the table, keeping his eyes somehow on all three of us at once. The owner has that look on his face like he was going to be in for it if we didn’t leave. Across the road, a ball is kicked into a net and the men at the tea shop jump up to applaud the TV.

  Again he ask – the owner mediates – You stay what guesthouse?

  Don’t tell him – Seth says – It’s none of his business…

  I won’t. We’ll leave, it’s okay.

  Seth and Jake stand from the table and reach for their wallets to pay. The wife in the corner lays the baby on the table and tallies the bill on the pad. But the officer puts his hand out, mutters to the woman with the tiny lips and they both stand ready to leave. The officer stares at the owner, a long dark glare the colour of a lie. He drags his index finger across his throat. The restaurant is a rectangle of silence as they turn and leave.

  We weren’t even talking about politics – I say – Don’t know what his problem was.

  He was listening to us, from outside…about the boat ride.

  I don’t know.

  That must have been it.

  Then the restaurant plunges back into darkness. Across the road, the men watching football cry out as the television snaps off. Moments of pitch black at the plastic-covere
d table, silent except for the shouts from the tea shop, then the sudden pull-start of the generator and the feeling that everything in the country had been kicked in the gut but was determined to get up again like it had a thousand times before.

  I say goodnight to the British guys and wish them luck on their trek. I close the door to my room and feel around for the flashlight in the dark, my room where my backpack lay open on the second bed looking in the shadows like the mound of a sleeping body I was finally coming home to. It was a shame the men across the street couldn’t finish the game. Their dejected footsteps picked across the shattered sidewalks ahead of me, the beams of the oncoming headlights blinding us.

  The Spanish couple is silent now. I curl beneath the blankets thinking about what Seth had told about the prisoner. That was tough to hear, especially after the officer left the restaurant having done what he did. I hope the owner is alright. But that’s how these places are, I think, as I pull the blankets over my head. Beautiful but dangerous. The owner had to translate to us and I could see on his face he didn’t want to but had no choice. All of us understood and were on his side. And then the frustrated shouts from the men across the street where the TV had gone out.

  Maybe I should have stayed in Thailand, stayed swinging in hammocks next to beach bars, not venturing out into the wilds of Asia just to suffer this loneliness. Like at the lookout, when I stared across the valley feeling fresh after my shower and the water buffalo were called home by the bells of their owners as the sun set. The huts down in the valley beginning to smoke from their evening fires and the children chasing their dogs and the hills glowing purple in the dusk and beyond them, just the trees.

  A FIRE IN THE CLEARING

  Gravel ricocheted off the undercarriage as the steel-coloured Volvo sped up. The steady percussion of stones masked the noise of the camping gear shifting in the trunk as the vehicle pitched and swayed over potholes. The road getting worse meant he was nearly there. All his favorite places in the province were like that, at the distant ends of deteriorating gravel roads. He loved the kind that led to where you could drive no further, where you would slow to a crawl, become blocked by a body of white-capped water or an impassable forest of spruce, the kind that lead to the cabin.

  The blue glow of the dashboard matched the headlights’ intensity. A shower of insects blazed white on the windshield. As a boy he’d seen deer along this road – a doe had once darted out with her fawn. Their coal-black marmoreal stares froze in the high beams and for the only time he could remember he’d heard his father swear out loud.

  Goddamn deer. Just in time.

  This far north the lakes fanned outward like amoebas. Wild eskers of forested shoreline separated each inlet and cove, wending around each other in a geographical labyrinth. The radio still crackled with reception. He’d expected that much at least, but surprisingly his cellphone still showed three bars. Progress, sure.

  A kilometre more, he thought.

  He would assemble the tent using a fire for light. To gather wood he would have to be cautious and use the headlights. Running out of battery this deep in the backwoods could land him in all sorts of trouble he’d rather not think about. He’d get the flames going by nesting birch bark with clumps of old needles and dead leaves. Later he would add kindling, a few heavier branches. Larger blow-down would be easy to find and there was never much wind that would make it past the treeline at the shore. One dead pine or cedar would be fuel enough. It was good there wasn’t any wind, he thought. There was also moisture on the grass and in the soil – just a few centimetres of peat over a bedrock of limestone, only enough for a thin set of roots to grow. Dry, peat soil could spread a fire, even keeping it alive underground if given a steady supply of oxygen.

  When he pulled into the clearing and stopped, the grass came as high as the driver-side window. Through the rolled-down opening he smelled the damp stalks and the wet tannin of mud. He switched off the headlights and sat in silence as the familiar shape of the cabin began to edge itself out from the blackness. He breathed in full lungs of air in the audible quiet: crickets, a frog croaking its coordinates somewhere in the dark like a two-toned ratchet, the sound of waves muted in the distance.

  Slowly the posts of the weathered grey porch appeared, then the tilted eaves of the roof stopping where the blackberry bushes had wildly overgrown. Next, he saw the worn log siding, the Indian chair crafted from bent saplings and bark. The faded colour in the corner was a forgotten beach towel, crumpled and solidified beneath ten winters of snow. The cabin looked smaller than he remembered. The roof had caved at the back, maybe that was why. He was always surprised at the difference the passing of years made to the memory of objects. Rooms shrank. Ceilings drifted downward. How much smaller everything was that had been magnificent and indestructible as a kid. So fallible what had once seemed faultless. Nothing ever stayed the same as you remembered it.

  The cell phone vibrated on the front seat. Flipping it open, he stepped out and undid his fly, turning toward the forest.

  Hi – she said – Are you there?

  Yeah. Just now.

  What’s it look like?

  Hasn’t moved.

  So it’s the same.

  Nearly. Roof’s fallen in a bit.

  What’s that noise?

  I’m taking a piss.

  Jesus…

  Long drive, hon.

  Her receiver made a noise as it scuffed against her chin and then he heard a soft cuss word like her voice was far from the mouthpiece. He shouldered the phone and did up his fly.

  …I just stubbed my toe on the bed – she said.

  Sit down then. Stop pacing.

  So tonight? Will you?

  The morning’s better. In the light.

  You promised, though.

  I know…I know I did.

  Closing the phone, he was alone again in the quiet. Through breaks in the cloud he caught brief glimpses of stars. The clearing looked brighter; his eyes had better adjusted. Dim bursts of light flashed through the branches as the beam from the Knife Island lighthouse whipped around from the far side of the bay. As a boy he used to lie in bed in the loft, the plaid curtain pinned back from the window, counting the flashes before falling asleep. The sound of the evening news muffled upward from the radio where a amp glowed beside the easy chair his father reclined in. If he snuck out of bed and picked silently across the floor, he could peer over the wooden railing at the mass of his father’s hair, thick as bear fur, spiking over the headrest. Cans of meat stew still yawned open on the counter from dinner. Get to bed, his father scolded without turning. How can you tell, Dad? I just can. Maybe it was a raccoon. You’re a raccoon. Now get to bed.

  From where he stood in the clearing, he could see up to the tiny window and the plaid curtain he’d tacked back on the nail. So much had happened, he thought. Some time ago. Ages ago. The same cabin, the same log walls. His own childhood seemed so remotely impossible.

  After the kindling caught fire, he brought a heavier log to lay on top the pile. He assembled the tent to one side of the fire and then crawled inside to lay out the sleeping bag. From inside, the fire was a soft, constant glow through the nylon. He soaked up the pleasure of the tent, its paper-thin membrane that could trick you into believing that whatever lurked outside it couldn’t get you. His own daughter Alexis had loved camping for the same reason. It was the idea of protection, she confessed, more than anything.

  Webs snagged his hair as he stepped onto the sagging porch and felt above the lintel for the key. He hadn’t needed to lock it since there was nothing inside worth stealing. Vandals and thieves weren’t even a minor threat up here. People were just accustomed to locking up their things. It made them feel safer having the key to something – worthless or important, it didn’t matter. The lock resisted in his hand. He forced the key inside and had to use all his might to twist through its rust for it to open. When it finally gave with a thwack, he hesitated.
What if everything were the same?

  He felt like a burglar when the door creaked ajar and a ripple of light from the fire outside fell onto two dinner plates still vertical in the drying rack. The kettle on the stove was a frozen grey hen. Cutlery was scattered like rusted tools on the peeling laminate. Covered with dust, a cracked bar of soap still lay in its dish. As he stepped inside, the musk of the place pulled into his nostrils: Mold, soot, wet carpet with its watersnake smell, damp paper, sulfur, some tinge of metal like the aftertaste of eating snow. Breathing it all in, his eyes closed involuntarily. Suddenly he was a boy and his father stood at the stove boiling water, his broad shoulders caped in the red lumberjack’s coat that always hung behind the door. His dark terrifying beard, his thick hair pushed up at the back where the pillow had pressed. You helping me make the coffee? Come here then. Measure carefully. Can I have some too? When it’s ready, if you like. The morning heat buzzed off the grasses outside, the whole clearing a hot August meadow. The sound of his father’s boots on the floor, the steam from his first cup of coffee held cautiously in his hands.

  As his father had been with him, he’d been as severe with Alexis. Daughters were gorgeous yet unpredictable as pastures. She’d spent the summers with him at the cabin as a girl trapping bullfrogs along the shore in crude rock paddocks while he chopped and stacked firewood. Her hair would turn bleached and matted with the sun, freckles spraying bright constellations across her nose. When the autumn arrived and the nights turned colder she’d never wanted to leave. But while in the hospital, she’d refused to even look at him. He stood beside her outside in the snow as the smoke from her cigarette bathed up over the bandages on her wrists, the frozen turquoise of her hospital gown, the plastic I.V. tubing that held her upright like the strings of a marionette, the fiery red of her dreadlocks. You can’t stop me, Dad. Not if you tried. I’m in charge of what happens to me. When will you get that? You haven’t realized I’m not your daughter anymore. Even his memories of her seemed to be turning colder.

  The roof buckled critically over the small table his father had used as a desk. From the clearing he hadn’t been able to tell, but from inside the whole back corner looked like a kicked-in cardboard box. Magazines were puffy with moisture. Rodents had shredded the newspapers. Cedar and pine needles blanketed most surfaces. How can something endure such loneliness? He wondered where he’d been, what tasks he’d been absorbed in elsewhere while the roof silently, gradually, caved in.