Siri was once again sidelined while Santiago took his turn to tell another story. Dtui interrupted often to clarify points, looked shocked here, fascinated there, and at the end she sighed and raised her eyebrows. Then there was silence.
“What? What is it?” Siri said, flustered at being left in the dark.
“Oh, hello, Doc. You still there?” she smiled. “Look, I tell you what. I’m a bit tired…”
“Nurse Chundee Vongheuan, if you don’t tell me right this minute…”
She giggled. “Only joking, Doc. Keep your toupee on.” She took a sip of her whisky and settled back to begin Santiago’s story. “Now that the old fellow knows how weird you are, he seems to feel confident enough to tell you what really happened here. It seems there was more to the two interns than met the eye. He was afraid if he told you everything you’d think he was out of his mind, so he’s happy we can all be nuts together now.”
Santiago smiled and looked at Dtui as if he was enjoying the story he had told her anew. He threw back another mouthful of whisky like a fire-eater about to blow forth a torrent of flames.
Dtui began, “In Cuba, it seems, they have their own shamans and strong connections to the spirit world. There are big cults and little cults. Many of the priests of these cults are phony. But there are some that really communicate with the spirits.”
“Does Dr. Santiago actually believe this?” Siri asked.
Santiago laughed again when he understood the question.
“So he says. He strongly believes in the spirit world. He says he’s seen too much in his life that has no scientific explanation. He says if you like, he could spend the next two weeks describing the rites of Palo and-what was it, Santeria?” She looked at Santiago, who nodded. “We don’t want him to do that, do we?”
“I think not.”
“Good. Then I’ll just keep to the point: the reason that he sent the two Cuban orderlies home. It wasn’t because Isandro was fooling around with the local girls. That was a good excuse, something he could write in a report to Havana. But there were other reasons. He was happy with the work they did, so obviously the things he found out about them had to be serious for him to sacrifice two valuable assistants.”
She stopped.
“Well, what were they, these reasons?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“What?”
“He says he’ll take us to their cave in the morning so we can see for ourselves. Frustrating, isn’t it?”
“Painfully so.”
No amount of pleading and sulking would force the Cuban to change his plan.
They finished their nightcaps and retired to their allotted sleeping spaces in the nearby middle-school classrooms.
Earlier, Siri had been shown his spot, where several nylon quilts were laid out for him at the front of a year-two classroom. Someone had chalked WELCOME VISITOR on the blackboard. But as he approached the room now, he noticed that the door was open and he heard peculiar sounds from inside. Desks were being shifted. Something dropped to the floor and broke. Breaths, deep inhuman snorts. He considered going for help but realized he didn’t know what he needed help for-or from. He grasped his amulet through his shirt and strode to the doorway.
In the light of a small orange candle someone had left burning for him on the teacher’s desk, Siri saw a bizarre scene. Five buffalo in the small room were each apparently vying for a position at the front by the blackboard. One creature had leaned against the chalk and been branded with the message Two had already claimed their places of honor and lay on the dirt floor on either side of Siri’s quilt like enormous Dutch wives. All five looked up at him when he entered the classroom and, as far as creatures with no upper teeth are able, they smiled.
A Wart on the Hog
Mr. Geung’s eyes opened slowly. There were no sharp edges anywhere. Colors seemed to bleed together. He knew it was morning because a cock was crowing; the sun was throwing out threads of light like a spider building the web of a new day. He’d awakened with the sunrise for most of the mornings of his life, but never here, never like this. This was-what?-not a house because there were no walls-but a roof. People were sleeping around him. He shifted, but one side of him was stiff. He ached numbly as if something heavy had slept on half of his chest. He looked down to see that he was fully dressed-boots and all-to the waist. His upper body was naked except for a long dirty pink bandage that wound tightly around his chest, his neck, and his upper arm. He touched the bandage tentatively, knowing it hadn’t been there before and wondering what it was for. When his fingers reached a place by his left shoulder he winced. Something serious had happened there. He didn’t remember the shot or the blood, only that he had to get to Vientiane to look after the morgue. He sat up.
“Hey, Kum,” he heard. “He’s up.”
One of the bodies sleeping under the roof of the wall-less hut stirred from its place on the ground and came to Geung’s side. It was a man of around Geung’s own height with sun-darkened skin and short spiky hair. Across his shoulder was a belt of bullets. It must have been terribly uncomfortable to sleep on, Geung thought. The man’s voice sounded bruised.
“How you feeling?”
“I… I’m good,” Geung told him.
The man turned his back and yelled across to the colleague who’d spoken first. “He says he’s all right. He can talk.”
“Yeah, some of ‘em do,” came the reply.
Spiky Hair spoke slowly as if Geung were of another species. “I shot you. Do you understand?”
Geung looked at the pink bandage and nodded. His memory was slowly returning.
“I’m sorry,” the man continued. “It was a mistake. I thought you were… Well, no. I didn’t know what you were. I just shot. If I’d known you were… like you are, I would never…”
“Get him to forgive you,” came the floor-bound voice. Slowly, other bodies were beginning to stir.
“I need you to forgive me,” Spiky Hair said. “I can’t afford to lose any more credits. You understand? You could really mess up my karma. Buddha’s pissed enough already that I’ve resorted to thieving. But he was getting used to the idea till you come along. Now I’m back in the shits. You forgiving me would really help get me back in the good books.”
Geung didn’t have a clue as to what the man was talking about. “Who… o… o’re you?” he asked.
Spiky Hair sat beside Geung and sighed. Forgiveness always came at a cost. “I used to be a soldier,” he whispered. “Except I was on the wrong side. Now, I’m… now we’re what they call opportunists. You know? We wait for trucks and convoys that aren’t too seriously guarded and we sort of ask them if they can help us out with a few kip. We were lying in wait in the field when you crept up and spooked me.
You know? I thought you were after us. I didn’t know you were… how you are, honest.”
“C… can I go?”
“Go? Go where?”
“Vientiane.”
“That’s a damned long way.”
“I promised.”
“Look, I’m not sure you’re up to that journey, brother. Although there’s no infection. The bullet wasn’t that big and it went right through you. You hollered like a wild sow when we scrubbed at it with white spirit but I reckon we cleaned it up all right. But you’re going to ache for a while.”
“C… can I g… go?”
Spiky Hair shouted back over his shoulder, “He wants to go.”
“Then let him go.”
“What if he dies on the way?”
“Not your problem. Once he’s out of here, you’re off the hook.”
“Why don’t you just forget all that religious crap?” someone else said. “You’re a bandit. You’ll never get close enough to sniff Nirvana.”
“No. Don’t say that.” Spiky Hair looked desperately at Geung and asked again, “Do you forgive me?”
“Okay.”
“Really? Thanks. That’s big of you.”
To show his gratitude
, Spiky Hair put together some rations for Geung and walked a few kilometers with him. The effects of the opium Geung had been sedated with started to wear off and he grimaced with each step. Soon they were picking their way through thick vegetation that teemed with insects and wildlife. Lizards scurried out of their path, and squirrels climbed out of reach.
“Where’s the r… road?” Geung asked.
“Road? You don’t need a road. I thought you people were like dogs, just followed your noses.”
Geung turned to him, bristling. “I… I’m no dog.”
“Okay, take it easy.”
“No dog.” His face turned pink with indignation.
“All right. Gee. I’m sorry. Listen. If you follow the road it’ll add another sixty miles to your trip. Understand? The thing winds all over the place. Just keep the sun on your left shoulder blade in the morning and your right tit in the afternoon. That should put you on a straight line.”
“I’m no dog.”
“I get it. You aren’t really paying attention, are you?”
“Well, I… I’m not.”
They walked on but it was another twenty minutes before Geung forgave Spiky Hair for calling him a dog. Shooting him was one thing. Calling him a dog was another thing completely. By then his guide had come up with a plan to make the instructions clearer. The supplies he’d prepared for Geung were in a cloth shoulder bag on a long strap. As the gunshot wound was on the right, he hooked the bag over Geung’s left shoulder to hang at his right hip. He explained that the sun should climb up the back of the strap in the morning and down the front in the afternoon. He made up a little song that just happened to rhyme: “The sun wakes up and climbs my back / At evening drops into my sack.”
They must have sung it a thousand times by the time they reached the foot of the Kuang Si waterfall. Spiky Hair still wasn’t sure that Geung had grasped the idea, although he certainly knew the song well enough. He filled a canteen from the clear stream and put it in the pack with its stolen food and a supply of opium for when the shoulder started to act up. He made Geung promise not to take all the opium at the same time but Geung reminded him he wasn’t stupid.
“No, of course not,” said Spiky Hair as he turned back and left Geung to his own devices. “Keep to the footpaths,” he said. He had little faith that Geung would make it to Vientiane but it didn’t matter. The bandit had gained enough merit to compensate for that. Even a donkey would have more sense than to set off on a hundred and fifty-mile trek on a day as dry as a dead man’s scrotum.
Panoy made it through the night. Her breath was shallow but her vital signs looked promising. Dtui felt confident enough to leave her for an hour and walk with the doctors to the complex that had once housed the Cuban workers. During the height of the bombing, some two hundred villagers had also spent their days in this network of caves that riddled the large limestone cliffs about a half mile from the hospital. Nowadays only the front section was used for storage and for keeping fodder dry in the rainy season. The rest was deserted.
As they neared the caves, Santiago told Dtui about the locals’ resilience in the face of massive military offensives. The natives always seemed to have smiles on their faces during the air raids. He laughed as he told her how, early in the conflict, the American secretary of state had described Vietnam as a hog and Laos as no more than a wart on that hog. “But look how much trouble that little wart made for the great Americanos.”
When they arrived at the front of the cave, Santiago introduced them to the Sheraton. It was even chalked there on the overhang: SHERATON DE LAOS. They’d brought their headlamps with them and they switched them on as they walked through Reception, a large, high-ceilinged cavern where most of the locals had stayed. Santiago led them to a smaller room that had once housed the Cuban contingent. It was empty now and there were no posters or mementos or signs of life other than a few scratched calendars here and there.
Santiago had stayed here when the work was going on at the hospital, he told them. It was a joint Vietnamese-Cuban project but the Viets had their own cave and they didn’t mix much with the Cubans. It was on this project he’d first met and locked horns with Comrade Lit. Before he was promoted to head of security for the region, Lit had been the overseer of the Vietnamese engineers. The Cubans had skills and a good deal of knowledge, but from the beginning, Lit seemed to treat them like country bumpkins, no better than assistants. When his superiors informed Lit he was supposed to take orders from Dr. Santiago, that the doctor was to run the hospital project, Lit lost face. Santiago believed that Lit had never been able to forgive him for that.
Dtui was having trouble keeping up with him, so Santiago agreed to simplify both his language and his explanations. He told them that in the beginning, he’d considered the negritos to be friendly men, always in a happy mood. They worked hard and were good at their jobs. But Santiago had started to hear rumors, bad rumors from his staff. His country, as well as Haiti, had a tradition of black magic going all the way back to Africa. In Haiti it was known as Voudoun; in Cuba, Palo Mayombe. Cubans believed that Palo remedies could cure all ills. They could charm a lover and even change the ugly into the beautiful. Dr. Santiago joked that he obviously hadn’t sampled that particular remedy.
In general the remedies did no harm. Many Cubans tried them just as the average person in Laos might read a horoscope. Some visited their shaman for counseling and a chance to have a chat. Some famous Palo Mayombe shamans were known to perform miracles. Most did only good for their communities. But there was a small cult, a branch of Palo, which was very dark. It was known as Endoke, a word derived from the name of the darkest spirit, which utilized sacrifices and bloodletting to invoke the spirits. Santiago had known patients who had suffered as a result of Endoke.
They were standing in an eerie cave where the only light came from the lamps on their own foreheads. With the sound of water dripping echoing around them, Santiago’s words were beginning to give Dtui the creeps.
“So,” Siri summarized, “the rumors were that the two men, Odon and Isandro, were practicing this Endoke.”
Dr. Santiago nodded. At first he’d done nothing; he knew that Cubans liked to make up stories, just like the Lao or the Vietnamese, to entertain their friends around a campfire or to scare the children to keep them from wandering off. But one day, a nurse came to Santiago and led him deep into the mountain in which they now stood. Asking Siri and Dtui to follow him, he walked off into the darkness.
The caves tunneled into the karst, narrowing as they proceeded. Dtui looked forlornly at Siri. Only a few months earlier, the pair had been involved in a horrific case that had taken them into tunnels such as these. Few sane people would knowingly set off down such dark passages again before that trauma had worked its way out of their systems. Siri paused and looked back at Dtui. “Are you up for this?”
“You know me, Doc. Anything for a laugh,” she answered without convincing either of them. They scurried after Santiago’s retreating light beam, Siri bringing up the rear. Fortunately, they didn’t have to venture too deeply into the mountain. Santiago seemed to know his way around the caves and they soon found themselves at their destination.
The Cuban stopped and stood back, letting the light beam do the explaining for him. They were at a dead end that formed a natural altar with a ledge. Unreadable symbols were chalked on the wall, and mud had been fashioned into an ornate frame around them. Siri took a step forward and shone his light onto the ledge. He leaned over and sniffed at the dark stain that began on the shelf and dribbled down, in parallel lines, from its edge.
Santiago confirmed that it was blood: this was a sacrificial altar. When he’d first seen it, there had been other objects around it including a cauldron, he said, but someone had removed everything.
Dtui scrunched up her nose. “Well, at least this ledge isn’t wide enough to sacrifice people on.”
Santiago explained that most basic Endoke spells only required the blood of chickens and pigs.
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“So, apart from cruelty to animals and depletion of food stocks,” Dtui suggested, “Isandro and Odon weren’t really dangerous.”
But when she translated her comment for the Cuban, he became irate. He took Dtui’s hand in his as he explained just how dangerous they had been. The blood from the animals they sacrificed was intended to call down spells of heavy black magic to satisfy the desire for revenge. Endoke was a magic of vengeance. If you stole a man’s wife, he would curse you. If you killed a man’s brother, he would damn you to sufferings even worse than death. One should never dare to cross an Endoke priest.
Dtui had just asked whether Santiago believed these two men actually had such powers when, from the corner of her eye, she noticed Siri’s hand reach for the amulet beneath his shirt as he stared back into the darkness. Santiago, however, was looking at the altar as he told her that he believed the markings she’d found on their mummy were known as “The Scratches,” the symbol identifying those who practiced the dark arts. Once he’d discovered their altar, he had confronted the two men in his office one day, forced them to take off their shirts, and had discovered their ritual scars. That was when he had-
“How many?” Siri asked. He’d removed his flashlight headband and was squinting back in the direction from which they’d walked.
Dtui didn’t even bother to translate the question. “Three on each side, Doc. Come on. Keep up. I’ve told…” She suddenly realized the question wasn’t directed to her. Siri wasn’t involved in their conversation at all. She shone her flashlight beam into the empty tunnel. The light seemed to snap Siri out of a trance.
“One of them is coming,” he said to Dtui.
“One of whom?”
“The spirits of the negritos.”
She was reluctant to translate this but she owed it to Santiago. The old doctor seemed to take the news even worse than she did. He backed up against the altar, his black-olive colored eyes flitting back and forth across the darkness.
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