Curse of the Pogo Stick (18 page)

He eased his neck against the crick and once more reached to scratch the absent earlobe. That’s when he noticed the cloth beside him on the platform. It was the most beautifully embroidered
pa n’tow
he had ever seen. He held it up in front of his face. It was a handcrafted picture on blue⁄grey cloth no more than eighteen inches square but months of work had gone into its sewing. He held it to his nose and could smell the familiar natural scent of its maker. Bao hadn’t struck him as the embroidering type but he knew the skill would have been passed down from her grandmother and mother when she was a little girl. She had learned her lesson beautifully.

He studied the frieze, a photographic moment from the village. There were the houses, the ponies, and the livestock. The spring pond lay in white lines on the hill and wild animals came to drink from it. Women milled around the village in their fine costumes, one swollen with child. Young folk played and men worked. Elder Long and his departed wife, Zhong, stood proudly at its centre holding hands. And, almost as an afterthought, a cloud floated across the sky and on it sat an old man with green eyes and white hair. Above his head, a ring of yellow thread made a halo.

Siri lay back and smiled at his gift, he traced the raised cotton of Bao’s needlecraft, and he fancied he smelled her there too on his pillow. Only then did it occur to him what was missing from the village – sound. An unexplained anxiety fell over him. He looked towards the shaman’s altar. The pogo stick and all its trappings were gone. He forgot his aches and pains and made for the door. Once his eyes were accustomed to the bright sunlight he was able to look about him at the empty village. There were no animals. The chicken coop and stable were empty. No surviving pigs, no goats, no reincarnated dogs. And no people.

He hurried across the compound to the main house and stood in the doorway. The room partitions were disassembled and the dirt floor had been excavated here and there: one hole beneath the central beam where once the placentas of all newborns were buried, others around the rim where valuables had probably been hidden to keep them safe from marauders during the unattended days. The silver jewellery and ornaments he’d seen little sign of since his arrival had gone with their owners. With the whisky still buzzing in their heads, the Hmong had packed their valuables and their opium nuggets and their salted pig meat and they’d left. And Siri had slept through it all. His chest felt empty as if some important organ had been removed from it. He held the
pa n’tow
to his nose and breathed in the strength and youth of his General Bao and the courage of her tribe.

If he hadn’t been so dehydrated, he might have even managed a tear or two. Something about the countryside released the emotions that remained bottled in the city. Perhaps he wasn’t just sad for the plight of these friends, perhaps it was a global, all-encompassing sadness that included his whole country, and the hopelessness of life, and the fact that there would never really be peace in the world because man was intrinsically stupid. At that moment, with the mother of all hangovers pounding in his head, he felt he shouldered the misery of every victim in the universe.

He gulped down several mouthfuls of water from the communal urn and carried a bowl to the hut of weak-minded Assistant Haeng. The judge had that soggy grey look of someone who’d slept too long. Siri dribbled water into his mouth and watched him swallow in his sleep. He folded the judge’s indigo hands across his chest so he looked like a gloved body in a coffin.

“Rest in peace,” he said, and left the judge to collect more dreams that might absorb and overwhelm his confusing reality of the past few days.

Siri made his way up the hill, passed the charred and still smoking remains of the haunted house, and carried on over the crest and down the hidden trail they’d walked the day before. The feeling of unrest was particularly strong here but at least he now knew what malevolent spirits he was dealing with. It was a steep drop to the valley but Siri had lived in mountains for a large chunk of his life. He negotiated the rocky trail like a goat. It wasn’t long before he reached the transporter, almost completely shrouded in jungle.

“Don’t worry,” Siri called. “It’s me, Yeh Ming. I’m alone.”

The boy appeared behind him on the narrow trail with a fearsome-looking submachine gun.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, like a high-school student addressing his teacher.

“How’s my patient?”

“She’s very fine, sir. Very fine.”

He led Siri to the back of the plane where Chamee lay on a bunched-up parachute. She was a far better colour than she’d been the day before. He checked the pulse and temperature of the little mother and asked permission to look at the incision. She nodded and talked to the roof of the plane while he checked his handiwork.

“Bao came,” she said.

“What?” He stopped.

“Bao, she came to see me early this morning.”

“Really? How on earth did she find you?”

“You told her we were here.”

“Even so, it isn’t the easiest trail to pick up, especially before light.”

“Our Bao is special.”

“Yes, I think she is. And?”

He was pleased with the wound and began to change the dressing.

“She was kind. She pretended to be mad at first. But then she said she understood what we did. She knew people would be disgusted with us and it was better for the girls if they were raised by the others. But she didn’t want us to disappear. She said if I had a problem I should try to contact her through our clan.”

“That was good of her.”

“Yes, she’s given me hope. She gave me a message for you too.”

Siri tried to hang on to his professional demeanor. “Oh?”

“She said you and your assistant should stay where you are and that you’ll be rescued soon.”

“Oh, I see. How could she be so sure of that?”

“The
geng
.”

“Of course.”

Siri had changed the dressing and was confident there would be no problem. She was a hardy young thing and would live to be a hundred, he told her.

“And she said for me to tell you…” She smiled at her boy husband. “That she’s sorry she couldn’t marry you yet but she has to guide her people to safety. She’ll come back to you after they’ve found a new home.”

“What a silly thing to say,” Siri blushed.

“She loves you, Yeh Ming.”

Siri busied himself with bandages and lint.

“And, of course, I’m very fond of her, in a sort of great-grandfatherly kind of way.” He was annoyed that he’d felt it necessary to categorize his love. The young soldier contributed to the emotion of the moment without the slightest embarrassment.

“And we love you too, sir. Me and Chamee. If you weren’t here my woman would be dead by now. We’ll always remember you and say prayers to you at the ceremony of the ancestors.”

“Well, I’m not exactly dead yet but, of course, it was my pleasure,” Siri said. He’d topped himself up with water in the village so his eyes watered nicely at the sight of this pretty pair in front of him. “And perhaps I could ask you a favour.”

“Anything,” the boy said.

“The fliers. The men who were in this plane when it went down.”

“They were American pilots, sir. I buried their remains. I gave them a decent send off.”

“A Hmong funeral?”

“Just a little one, sir. As best as I could remember it.”

“That was very good of you. But their souls aren’t content where they are. They want to go home.”

The boy nodded and Chamee squeezed his hand.

“I can understand that. We’ve felt something here.”

“I need to find their families.”

“They didn’t have dog tags, sir. The American fliers at Long Chen weren’t encouraged to wear them because they weren’t supposed to be here.”

“Never mind, son.” Siri nodded. “We have the number of the plane. It shouldn’t be that hard to identify them. Where are they?”

Siri walked forlornly down the hill to the village with the remains of Daniel (Danny) San Souci and Eric Stone wrapped in a strip of tarpaulin. Their names were on personal letters they’d carried with them, probably against regulations. But the men who fought the secret war were tough, experienced pilots who lived every day as if it were the last because, for many of them, it was. These two had probably outweighed Siri by a few hundred pounds when they were alive, but now he carried them both under one arm. They were the reason why the Otherworld had been set in a Western city on Siri’s journey. The spirits of Danny and Eric had erected the scenery. It was they, not Chamee, who had coaxed Siri to the beyond. Theirs were the souls that needed rescuing from limbo, not hers. It wasn’t clear how the green button had made it into the rock pool, but it had obviously belonged to one of the pilots. When they saw it, the spirits could sense how close Siri had come to finding their remains. It had given them hope. It was his duty now to put them to rest.

The village was laid out before him, lifeless and without soul. Lumps of disused buildings perched on a hillside. Then something moved by the main house. At first he thought it might be Judge Haeng out looking for some new way to do away with himself, but as he got closer he could see a pony tethered there. A Hmong girl sat on the outside bench. He quickened his pace, but when he rounded the house he saw Dia skimming her sandalled feet over the dust.

“Dia, what’s wrong?”

“Hello, Yeh Ming. Nothing big,” she said. “I’m the fastest rider so they sent me back to let you know what we decided. I have to catch up with them.”

He sat on the bench beside her.

“What happened?”

“We met another group. They were on their way to join the big march too. They told Elder Long about relatives of theirs who’d gone before. They’d travelled at night to avoid PL patrols and the Vietnamese troops. They said a lot of the PL soldiers still hate us from the war and they kill our people on sight. No arrest, just bang bang. They had to be very quiet so they wouldn’t be spotted. In the daytime the Hmong could sleep somewhere hidden away, but…”

She looked at the distance and tried to steady her voice.

“But what?”

“But often the group’s location was given away by little children. A baby would cry and the PL would find the group and kill all of them. Some groups were so afraid they abandoned mothers and infants or they accidentally suffocated the babies trying to keep them quiet.”

“That’s awful.”

“So, Elder Long thought…” She looked sheepish.

“Where are they?”

She smiled and pointed to the shaman’s hut.

“Elder Long says it will just be until we get to Thailand. He says for you to give me an address and he’ll contact you and we can find a way to get them over the river. He said you’d know a way because you’re Yeh Ming.”

Siri’s laughter filled the valleys around. It was apparent from the look on her face that Dia couldn’t understand why this was so funny. She’d rather expected him to be angry. But Siri had his reason. The prophesy had come true in the most roundabout way. Two months earlier, Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite fortune-teller, had predicted Siri would be married and have two children before the rains started. At the time it hadn’t seemed credible, not to mention physically possible. Now he had no choice but to formally add one more branch of sorcery to his list of irrational beliefs. Fortune-telling had become a science. Soon there’d be nothing but politics left to dismiss as bunkum.

“Oh, I brought you back a goat as well,” Dia said.

“Two babies and a goat on one little pony. You should be in the circus.”

“Bao said you’d need it ‘cause she didn’t think you’d be able to breast-feed the twins yourself.”

“Very thoughtful of her.”

“And she said she misses you.”

“Tell her I miss her too. I miss all of you. I won’t sleep till I know you’re safe in Thailand.”

Dia climbed onto her pony and turned three circuits until they were pointed in the right direction.

“Oh, and there’s a platoon of PL soldiers two ridges across. You might want to do something to get their attention. They’ve got the same sense of direction as your assistant,” she laughed. “Bye, Yeh Ming.”

Siri stood and watched her ride off. They were all so positive, so good-humoured. They were setting off on a journey of a hundred and fifty kilometres through hostile country. When they reached the limits of the lands they knew and trusted, they would abandon the animals and cover the final stretch on foot. The odds of all of them making it were poor. Yet they could still joke and talk of adventure. In their hearts they must have known that the lives their families had lived for centuries were to become legend.

Siri said good morning to the twins, selected a particularly splendid Zippo from the collection, and returned to set fire to the main hut.

QUIET AS THE MORGUE

T
he brand-new Mi-8 helicopter touched down directly on the grounds of Mahosot Hospital. Until the warranty ran out it would continue to have a Russian pilot at the controls, which explains why it didn’t remove the hospital roof or land in the trees. It did, however, manage to blow all of the new chrysanthemums out of their bed. Stretcher bearers crouching low ran to the open hatchway, carefully lifted Judge Haeng onto the canvas, and whisked him away. The helicopter could have taken him to the temporary field hospital in Sam Neua in the north, but Siri had insisted the man’s condition was so grave they had no choice but to take him directly to Vientiane.

It mattered not a jot to Siri that the judge had no condition to speak of. Apart from the broken wrist, once his boss had slept off the drug, he would be his old disagreeable self within twenty-four hours. Siri was just tired and he wanted to go home. Despite the incomprehensible ranting of the pilot, he insisted on remaining on board until the rotors had stopped spinning. He decided he was already short enough, thank you, and he preferred a dignified homecoming.

French medical and US military choppers had arrived frequently at the hospital during the war years but, four years later, all flights had stopped. So it wasn’t surprising that doctors and nurses and patients came spilling out of their buildings to look at the spectacularly gleaming Russian craft. To Siri’s profound disappointment, Dtui and Geung were not among them. He’d hoped to impress them.