Lobsters and Landmines

by Glen Johnson

  “Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel.” 1 Peter 2:18

  Leonard Solomon, or Lennie to his mates, before he was discharged from the army, rolled over onto his left-hand side. Lennie was forty-two but looked in his mid-fifties due to his scars; slack skin and sixty fags a day. He was skeletal thin and had been bold since his mid-twenties, and he always had a day of stubble on his greasy, spotty face.

  His right leg was giving him gyp again. The right ankle was aching like a bitch. The strangest thing was he had no right ankle, or leg up to the knee; he had lost it when Private Peter Swanson stood on a landmine four meters to his right, when he was on his last tour in Afghanistan. It happened in the country’s largest city, Kabul in the Khuja Ruwash neighborhood. He also had no right arm up to the elbow and only two fingers and a thumb on his left hand. It seems like he got off bad, but Private Swanson was turned into mincemeat spread over a large area.

  It is called Phantom Limb, when a missing body part still feels like it is aching, twitching, itching, burning, or tingling. The cold weather is his worst enemy, then his leg, arm, and fingers all played up at once; it was just pure torture.

  That’s one of the reasons he moved from England to Vietnam. The other reasons were, so he could raise pigs, breed dogs, use women like slaves and abduct children.

  Lennie was not interested in the kids himself, that just wasn’t his style. Lennie liked the ladies – submissive, quiet and respectful females turned Lennie on, and if he had to beat them to get them in that state of mind, then that was fine by him. He never liked them too pretty, because their beauty mocked his disfigurement. They had to be slim and slight, with long black hair. If they were too pretty when they first arrived, then an assortment of beating and cutting soon sorted that out.

  The reason Lennie kidnapped and held children in the chain link fenced in area, next to his dogs and pigs, was because some very rich Americans paid him to do so. He was paid to collect ten children, five boys and five girls, between the ages of six and thirteen, and have them ready for when the five businessmen flew over once a year for their two-week vacation.

  He had to have the ten children clean, well fed, unblemished and healthy, and still virgins for when the white van turned up at his farm to collect them. Two weeks later the ten naked and mutilated bodies were returned for him to dispose of. His pigs and dogs fed well that week.

  Lennie tossed the thin, dirty sheet to the floor, and rolled his naked body into the sitting position. The heat was stifling. It had been up in the thirties all week, without any foreseeable letup. It was July, but normally it stayed in the pleasant twenties, but this month had been a scorcher, even for Vietnam.

  Sweat was already running down his shrapnel scarred back. It was only 8 AM, and already it was too hot.

  “Fucking heat!”

  A cockroach scuttled past on the bamboo floor and over a reed mat.

  He reached for a plastic bottle of water that sat on his wicker bedside table, next to an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. The water was lukewarm and unrefreshing.

  “Quyen!” Lennie shouted, which came out all husky. He waited for a heartbeat.

  “For fuck sake,” he whispered into his deformed hand as he rubbed his face with his two fingers and thumb.

  “Quyen!”

  With a clatter, the old wicker door flew open and the slight female came rushing in. She did not say a word; she just stood a respectful distance away and waited for instruction. She wore an ao dai, as did all his women – a traditional tight-fitting silk tunic over pantaloons. He was in Vietnam after all; he wanted them to look the part.

  “What took you so fucking long, whore?”

  Quyen did not answer the rhetorical question. She had learnt not to answer back. Quyen wasn’t her real name, Kim-Cuc Nguyễn was, but he had changed it when he took her from her village almost two years ago. Quyen meant bird, because after first arriving she tried to escape. The other woman with her was blown to smithereens when she stepped on a landmine. He made Quyen clean up the body parts that were left and feed them to the dogs.

  Around the area he lived, just northwest of Vietnam’s capital, Han Oi, in the Ha Giang and Lào Cai provinces it is estimated that one-third of all the land was saturated with unexploded landmines. Almost thirty-five years after the war finished, more than forty thousand people have died and over sixty thousand more maimed due to landmines. A resent report indicated that there was over sixteen million acres of land still contaminated across the country’s twenty-two provinces.

  When Lennie first arrived nine years ago, he spent two years doing mine removal for local villages and towns. He took what little money the people had to make their area safer for themselves and their children. However, Lennie never destroyed the landmines he was paid to remove from the countryside, instead he used them to surround and booby-trap his farmland. Only Lennie knew the right way in and out, anyone else would be vaporized. He built a prison without walls.

  “Leg. Arm. You should know by now!” Lennie spat.

  He had five women living on his farmland, ranging from about eighteen to thirty-five years of age. All five slept in a separate room. He didn’t want any of them sleeping in his bed, keeping him awake with their constant fidgeting and sweating bodies, or when they cried themselves to sleep.

  “Vâng chủ nhân.” Quyen said as she knelt in front of Lennie, wincing while doing so, she expected a slap for making him shout. She picked up a clean liner sock that slid over the naked stump.

  “Talk in English, you dee chaw gook!”

  “Yesh masther.” Quyen talked with a lisp after Lennie had dislocated her jaw and took a chunk out of her bottom lip, after beating her to within an inch of her life after she had first arrived. She had never raised a hand to defend herself; she let him pummel her like a sack of meat.

  After the sock, she picked up the silicone sheaf and sprayed alcohol into it, to kill bacteria, then rolled on the silicone sheaf that cushioned and protected the leg against chafing. Next, she picked up the cheap leg off the straw mat and proceeded to place the cup onto the stump, and afterwards roll the tight sheaf up over the leg, up to the thigh, which holds it in place. She then strapped the modified hunting knife to the false leg.

  Lennie did not carry the knife to protect himself from his slaves, because they knew if he died, they would never escape, because he was the only one who knew the way out. It was just from habit, and having it on him always reminded them of who was in charge.

  Lennie motioned his head towards the packet of cigarettes on the bedside table. Quyen pulled one out of the Phenix packet and lit it in her own mouth before placing it in Lennie’s.

  Lennie took a deep, long drag before blowing the smoke out the left-hand side of his mouth. One of the good things with living in Vietnam – according to Lennie – was that the cigarettes were so damn cheap. Because of the low costs, some of the largest tobacco companies in the world produced them in Vietnam and shipped them all over the world.

  He could hear the dogs starting to bark, getting excited.

  Hanh and Tien must be feeding them; he thought.

  Lennie bred dogs for their meat, the same as the pigs. Dog meat was still a delicacy in Vietnam; it was mostly eaten at the end of the lunar month to get rid of bad luck.

  As well as the ones he bred, he also spent a day collecting them on the way to the market. He set up his truck on the city’s outskirts and put fresh meat out for the strays. As they arrived to investigate, he slipped a noose around their neck. If they looked like good breeders, he would keep them, if not he quickly killed, gutted and skinned them. Once they were tossed in with the other carcasses, no one was ever the wiser.

  Hanh and Tien were nineteen-year-old female twins that Lennie had kidnapped over a year ago when he was making a meat delivery in Sa Pa. They only needed a month of beating to pull into line.

  Quyen started on Lennie’s arm. She slid on
a thick sock and then picked up the arm. It was basic and only had two blunt hook like pincers on the end. After sliding the stump in an elastic strap went over both shoulders, like a gun holster. Lennie stood up and allowed Quyen to dress him like a baby. Lennie did not like underwear, so his slack Hawaiian shorts were pulled up, and a baggy, well-worn, tee shirt with some eighties band that no one had ever heard of slipped over his head. Lennie pushed his left foot into a cheap flip-flop. With his two remaining fingers and thumb on his left hand he removed the cigarette.

  Quyen stood silent to one side; head lowed to show servitude and respect. It hurt more after he put his fake hand on; the metal cut and gouged the skin, as she already found out.

  Lennie walked past her and stood by the open window; he looked out across his small part of the world. With his disability and settlement money, Lennie brought one square mile of land in the Lào Cai province, just outside Sa Pa in the Northwest. His window had a spectacular view of Phan Xi Păng mountain of the Hoang Lien Son mountain range, the highest in Indochina. It was a lush green land, covered in forests, fields, and stepped rice paddies. He obtained the land for next to nothing, due to it being riddled with landmines. He soon sorted that out, or at least moved them to where he wanted them.

  “Clean the room,” Lennie said as he turned and exited the small bedroom, leaving Quyen to make his bed and sweep the floor and empty his piss bucket.

  His bedroom led to a small hallway, with just two other doors; one went to the harem, as he liked to call it, where the five women slept and kept their few belongings. He never went into their room, because he decided it stunk of menstrual fluids and piss. They only used the hallway door if they needed to minister to him; otherwise, they used the door that led out onto the dusty yard.

  Only one slave had ever become pregnant, over three years ago. The eighteen-year-old died in childbirth. The newborn baby boy was strong and healthy. Lennie had cut the umbilical cord with his knife, then carrying it by the cord, as the baby cried and wiggled, he took it to the large dog cage and threw it in.

  None of the others had become pregnant since. He presumed they used some kind of herbal birth control.

  The other door led to a washroom, where there was the only shower that ran from a large metal tank on the roof. The women had to take turns filling it each day from the well. He insisted they all showered at least once a day, even though he rarely did.

  The wooden hallway with bamboo flooring led into the large main room, where the food was prepared and ate. One side of the main room had shutters so the whole side could be opened up, to cool the space down, by letting the air circulate.

  Outside was a dusty yard. Piled up plates were being washed; they had all eaten before he woke up. He did not like to eat with them.

  Tuyet, his youngest slave of about seventeen, ran when she saw him, to deliver his chè – a Vietnamese thick, sweetened porridge. He took it without a word and carried on past Tuyet and Bich.

  Bich had been with him for seven years, and was his oldest slave. She had lasted longer than all the others had because she never spoke, at no time looked him in the eyes, and always did exactly as he told her. She stopped washing the dishes in a large yellow plastic tub, and sat quietly, with her head lowered. Lennie was always temperamental first thing in the morning, and he was more liable to lash out, especially today of all days.

  Lennie’s artificial knee needed oiling; it squeaked as he ambled along, with a slight sideways gait. He made a mental note to remind Quyen with his fist.

  Across the yard was the garden, where all the greens were grown, enough to support them all – water spinach, cabbage, chayote, bamboo shoots, kohlrabi, bitter melons, cucumbers and celyon spinach, all to accompany the limitless supply of pig and dog meat. In addition, a large cluster of dragon fruit trees sat just behind the wooden farmhouse.

  Lennie was impressed that they weeded and turned over the garden everyday before he woke up. He wouldn’t dream of complementing them, so he said nothing.

  Next to the stepped garden was the metal linked fences that wrapped around the rusty metal cages. Thirteen cages of various sizes, ranging from five by eight feet, with a raised wooden platform, out of the dry mud, with two timber sides and a corrugated iron roof, to keep off the worst of the rain and heat, for the ten children – they had a cage each.

  If the weather got too cold or wet, then he placed the children in a long concrete bunker that was here when he brought the property. It was part buried in the ground, with small windows placed high up, a couple of inches from the mud, to let some light and fresh air in. The bunker was twelve feet high, with just five feet above the ground, and fifty-five foot long. He used to keep the children in there all the time, but locking them up inside with no direct sunlight or fresh air made them ill, and the cold clammy floor gave them a hacking cough.

  Next to the children’s ten cages were three large twenty by thirty-foot cages for the dogs – depending on the dog’s size. One was a large twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot cage, which was partitioned inside with wooden fences for the bitches and suckling puppies. On the end was a fenced in muddy field where the large, fat Vietnamese potbellied pigs were kept.

  The whole area stunk of shit and piss, and there was always a constant whining, or barking or growling coming from the dog cages, or snorting from the pigs or crying from the children.

  Lennie walked along while drinking his sweet porridge from a plastic bowl.

  The dogs were nosier than normal because it was feeding time; they fought and tussled for every scrap. The weak were weaned out, killed, and then eaten by the others.

  Lennie stopped to look into the first cage. The large cage had forty dogs of various breeds; it was only large dogs in this cage. Most of the canines were fighting over by the hatch where the food was tossed in. All apart from one. The Bitch, Lennie liked to call her. She was one of his oldest dogs, and had produced more puppies than any other had. The Bitch was an Alsatian, scrawny and tough. Large patches of her fur were missing as well as one ear, and she was blind in one eye. She always stood in the same place everyday to wait as Lennie walked past. She did not growl or bark, or make any noise at all, but had her head slightly lowered and never looked into Lennie’s eyes, but always at his neck, as if waiting to rip out his throat.

  “Not today Bitch,” Lennie said as he walked past chuckling.

  Today was a very important day.

  Once a year a van turned up just after sunset, to pick the ten children up. Everything had to be ready.

  As he got closer, he could hear crying. The children who were here longest no longer cried. However, the new ones always did. Sometimes for weeks, or even months, but it stopped in the end.

  The children were Hue’s responsibility, even more so today. Hue mothered them too much, as if offering them hope, but he did not care, so long as she kept them quiet.

  Hue was in the new child’s cage, washing the small girl down with a bowl of soapy water. He did not know the children’s names and did not care; they were simply One through to Ten. The new girl, who was about nine years old, was number Ten.

  He had found her on his last trip, when he went to Han Oi’s Cho Dong Xuan market, to make his monthly delivery of pig and dog meat, ready for the end of the month. He only left his farm once a month for his deliveries and to collect all the food and provisions he would need. Therefore, he had twelve chances to grab the ten children. Which was not a problem, there were always children roaming around the streets, begging or stealing. Or sometimes a woman who would catch his eye.

  He had to grab at least one new slave each year, sometimes two, depending on how well they behaved, or how much he beat them. Some never learnt, and only lasted a few weeks. Or one would get an infection from a deep cut or broken bone. He never took them to the doctors; they had to sort it out between themselves.

  Number Ten, his new child, had been wandering around the market begging. He lured her over with a two hundred thousand Dong note. When he got her
around the corner, behind a pile of dried beans, he knocked her out and pushed her into his delivery cart, and covered her over with cloth sacks. The market was hectic, and noisy. No one saw or heard a thing, but then again, no one really cared. A couple of times someone had witnessed him bundling a child or woman into his trolley, and the person had simply looked away, not wanting any trouble.

  Possibly, they mistook him for the Công An Nhân Dân Việt Nam – The People’s Public Security of Vietnam, who was notorious for making people disappear. He may be British, but he had been in Vietnam long enough to blend in with his tan and disfigured body.

  Lennie stood by the pig’s fence, looking in. The large black pigs waddled around their field looking for food. Some were huge, up to seventeen stone in weight. Tuyet had already fed them this morning, but they were constantly hungry, always looking for more.

  Lennie turned around and leant on the fence. He could see Tuyet picking the purply red fruit from the cactus-like tree.

  Last night he had to check all the children were in good health, then making sure the women had made the children’s clothes properly. The American customers wanted the girls dressed in pure white dresses, and the boys in white trousers, with a naked chest and bare feet.

  He was tired by the time he crawled into bed. Too tired to call Tuyet to his room. As he looked at her now his loin stirred. He could do with a good fuck to clear his mind.

  Maybe after lunch?

  The last slave to die was two months ago; he bit off her left nipple while fucking her. She had caught an infection and died slowly and painfully. He had nearly cut her throat himself, because her crying had kept him awake for almost a week. He ended up making them move her from the room next door to the concrete bunker, where he could not hear her. He actually enjoyed feeding her to the pigs and dogs.

  It was almost time to round the women up and lock them in their room. He needed to clear a track of mines so the truck could drive through. He did not want any of his slaves to escape.