That Savage Water (5 page)

Come on, Shane. It would crush me to have to spend the night here.

Sahir jogs with me beside the doors of the moving carriage, the skis and duffel bag large and unwieldy.

You jump inside – he says – I will pass them to you. Go now. You see it's speeding up.

Running with the carriage, the train accelerates as Akram leaps aboard. I grab hold of the bar beside the door, jump and pull myself up and inside.

Your skis first… – Sahir shouts, running.

Keep them – I say – They're yours.

The steady clack of rails, its rocking speed, the sudden end of the asphalt platform like a precipice leapt and flown from. Sahir comes to a standstill, his green shalwar looped in the straps of my bags as we pull away into the cinder-bricked suburbs of Lahore graffitied by curls of Urdu script. Back to India, I think, to the safety of borders.

You're as good as a pro – Akram says as we catch our breaths – Few Indians will even play at that game, and even then only the crazy ones. But Shane, why did you give him those skis? That boy won't be able to use them in a thousand years.

To give him something to flee with – I think – To save himself, to outrun avalanches.

Thank God we didn't have to spend the night. A bloody hellhole, I tell you.

A train rumbles and sways in the kind of cadence the body remembers. In the seats ahead, the saris of women ripple in the evening breeze. Akram's head tilts to his chest in a doze. Already I feel the new growth of stubble roughen my chin, the border of India fifty kilometres ahead in the dusk, the passing farmland statued with goats and waddles of geese being led to their grassy creeks by shepherds in white turbans.

I wake in the night as the train suddenly slows. We crawl forward in approach to a crowd, a hundred men, semi-circular, crammed tight to the tracks. The sea of their faces passes my window near enough I smell the heat off their skin. In the mass of them, I swear I see one with the face of Mr. Mason, cold-eyed, acquitting, the whites of his irises flashing at me beneath police lights. There is the flapping of furious wings against my stomach, a whole flock panicking as one bird falls in a spray of feathers, hooked by the predator's claws. Through a break in the crowd, there is a dune of cloth and severed flesh, the dusty heap of a man on the tracks, his shalwar soaked in red, the skin of his feet, still in sandals, turned grey.

Our motorcycle pulls up in front of the bar; its red sign reflects in the puddles below the crumbling sidewalk. We step and scatter the red into ripples. The night air settles wet over our surfaces.

Yeah? On my life, you like this bar! – Piat, wide-grinned, leans the bike on its stand, twirls keys on his fingers – You come in! Come this bar, I show you girls. You see if you like, and if you no like, you no buy.

Wet season. Rain clouds hover on the horizon until four o'clock and as the sun descends, they scuttle over the city and wring themselves out in short bursts. Emerging into the clear air beneath, the sun licks an orange tongue over their bottom surfaces and turns the shivering reflection of the lake into a pit bright as magma. Travellers gather on the wooden porches of the surrounding guesthouses snapping photos in pleasant disbelief Phnom Penh has turned out to be so beautiful. Water hyacinths drift in clumps. Hammocks creak their sway along the beams. Piat wanders from table to table selling bags of skunk weed and Zippo lighter knock-offs. When someone asks about the corrupt government or how's life in Cambodia today for a boy of eighteen, he cries – It not good! On my life, it not good!

The Killing Fields
is on for the third time in the background. Shlomi looks over his shoulder at the TV then lays his head on his arms on the table.

I say – Fuck, that joint did me in too. What's it like in Israel anyway? Ever shoot a man with your gun? – and then stub the roach out in the plastic lid of the water bottle.

Never killed a man.

Israelis. I've always wanted to get to know one of them but they've always been ones to dance off to the side of things, cigarettes propped in tanned faces, shirtless, shooting pool with the newly arrived Swedish girls. They carry themselves proud like the French, still with their army dog-tags, whiffs of arrogance and stick-together. Whole guesthouses in Bangkok just for Israelis. But this one broke off the pack. He stood next to my table, looked down into my milkshake and said – What is that? Coconut?

Banana.

It doesn't look yellow to me – he'd lifted his chin with Israeli smugness.

Never killed a man – baked and bleary-eyed, he lifts his head from his arms – We weren't there to kill them, just to make them uncomfortable, you know. Just to keep them on edge. We were trained not to admit weakness to the enemy. So what if we make them wait five or six hours at checkpoints? So what if they have to line up for gasoline? It lets them know we're not kidding. That's our job. We fuck up their lives a bit. They wait because they have to, and we make them wait because we have to. It's all just a bunch of kids in uniforms anyway…

For no reason?

Of course there's a reason. Do you know what it takes just to keep a war going? Year after year with all the soldiers in their uniforms, the complexity of that machine? You know they invented bullets that change directions in your body? It goes in your shoulder, fucks up your bones, fucks up your organs then leaves through your leg. What do you think that shit costs?

Smoke ponders the space above the table.

Do you know what a bullet costs?

I've got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country… – From the bar, Khoi stares across the room at the TV with indifferent noontime eyes.


I've got a right to go wherever I like in this sad little country!
– Sam Waterston's voice shouts from the speakers under chopper blades –
That's their law. That's our law.


…up the Cooper-Church Amendment's ass…


Well, up the Cooper-Church Amendment's ass!

Khoi looks over at us – Sure, I know this movie. One hundred thousand times I see this movie. Every time new people come to this guesthouse they want to see
Killing Fields
. Maybe one million times I see this movie!

Shlomi says – These your cigarettes?

Every time. Every time they want
Killing Fields
. Hey, you have an iPod?

Khoi and I sit on the wooden deck built out over the water. Sparse lights dot the opposite shore like a band of constellations. Somewhere on the lake a motor throbs through the hyacinths, its wake knocking them against the posts of the deck. In the dark their surface looks solid enough to stand on.

As boys, we ride on the back of the buffalo and they take us through the rice – he says – Yeah, really! They don't care. You just sit on their back and they walk around the fields and eat grass. In the monsoon we go into the rice and look for snake, you know, because snake don't like water and so they are more easy to catch. Even when we have nothing to do, my brothers and sisters we play and we walk outside and make games. That is life here. Yeah. Now Cambodia have many problem. But before, Cambodia have
big
problem.

Piat tosses words with a man swinging in the hammock beside the entrance of the bar. With a chewed toothpick he pries into the crusts of his knuckles. Two girls with bare midriffs play with their nails on blue stools along the wall. A curtain of red beads is pinned back from the doorway.

He ask if you have weapon.

No weapons.

The bar is humid and foul-smelling inside. The walls are black and coated in red light from the bulbs in the low ceiling. At one end, a small platform supported by crates serves as a stage. Three girls are inside – one in the corner, one behind the bar, one just disappeared into a back room with her arm around a shirtless man. The girl's face at the bar is familiar as all of Southeast Asia. Red lips, a low nose with a flat bridge and flared nostrils. She has a patina to her skin that reveals exposure to heavier atmospheres, to particles of history that have burrowed into her irises, lined her face, accumulated beneath her lacquered fingernails like someone who has pawed at the earth for a reason.

Hi, handsome, what you want for tonight? You stay with me? What you like? – Thick as honey, her dripping voice. She chatters to the girl from the corner with the bigger nose, rolls of brown fat, a bad haircut. The uglier one who takes the sadder jobs.

Piat orders whiskey and flips through a binder of CDs.

She speak English. Tell her what you want.

What I want. What is that thing anyway? A trail of inflammations the bedbugs left from a dirty mattress in Bangkok I want to X through with my fingernail? Want. The shade of damp marijuana, a fishing net anchored by hyacinth roots?
That's their law. That's our law
. Ass. Firm brown nipples rubbed against sheer. Want is an imagined future harvested from lake bottoms of bones. At the door, an argument happens in sign language: two deaf lesbians.

Black storm clouds hover in the west over the lake. Two boys fish in a canoe using nets they lay and pull back in. Shlomi spies on them with the binoculars and says – Every day for hours and hours. What will they do when it starts to rain?

Cover their heads and paddle to shore. Our definitions of risk are different. They ride six to a bike here.

Piat strolls into the guesthouse with deliberate footsteps, his keys twirling. Wild eyes, high, sunken cheekbones, gestures he throws beyond his body limits into the surrounding air – On my life, man! You still here? I come from the market, you know, I meet my honey, eat noodles. You want to buy some skunk?

A recovering glue sniffer, a street kid who's found a profession, he must be. His face doesn't twitch but stretches into the most crazed and opened expressions. His laughs string enormous bridges of saliva across the corners of his lips. Selling skunk to stoner backpackers earns him a few thousand riel to buy noodles for his girlfriend at the market and a few tabs of M. He'll take you on his motorbike to Choeung Ek and wait around as you tour the fields and collect souvenir photos in high-def – skulls towered in pyramids, thigh bones stacked like timber, torn fabric still sprouting from the soil. Just like in the movie. Ten thousand riel for the day, S-21 prison included –
Before, Cambodia no good, you know?
– Isn't that what I want to hear?

Beside the bar, the blackboard reads:
Tonight – Killing Fields 7 pm
. Ceiling fans whirl and scatter threads of smoke unravelled from hands in sagging hammocks. A few travellers eating eggs watch CNN, compare the routes they took to Angkor, how much they enjoyed Laos. Beyond the deck, the morning sun has not yet risen into the bank of grey clouds.

I say to Piat – Where you been? Stay out all night?

Laughing, wild eyes with morning hair – No, man, I get this! Fresh today, you see? Best weed grows in Battambang, but in Phnom Penh you can only buy from me. No buy in Siem Reap or Sihanoukville. If you want, buy now. Later, I don't have, you know. I smoke too much!

I dunno…

Why not! Come on, man, just buy my skunk!

A little weed for the coming weather isn't such a bad idea. The guy's price is high, but he's so damn charming I feel I owe him the business.

I'll buy skunk and you take me to S-21 prison today for free.

His mouth stretches open in a huge gulp of laughter, his eyes disappear and those constant tendons of drool – Free? Come on, man! Now gasoline is very high price! Now Cambodia no good! Skunk already good price, you know, friend price. On my life! How much you pay?

Bag of skunk, Tuol Sleng prison, and tonight a trip to his favorite girlie bar – only couple thousand riel. But if he's happy with it, I know I've gotten screwed. Here it's always this push–pull: Don't rip or get ripped off. Cheap Charlie peeling bills from a sweaty money-belt, his peripheral vision on vigilant lookout for thieves. The sucker white guy with bottomless pockets of dollars.

Piat pitches his skunk deal to an Australian in a hammock. The Israeli walks across the deck over to my table, looks down at my milkshake and says – What is that, coconut?

Girl with the flat nose shouts over to Piat and their thick Khmer tumbles over the bar. He hands her a CD to put into the portable stereo in the corner on the floor by the stage. She bends over, a hole yawning open in her stockings – the upper thigh near the crease of her ass. Cambodian rap punches through shitty speakers. The lesbians sit brooding on the bar stools in silence. The two girls from outside sidle up to us.

Piat says – See look, my honeys!

The wide-nosed girl says – What you like, handsome? You want to see my menu? You want see how we do for you? We play, we do fun. If you want, we can do more. If you no like girl, maybe you want boy?

No boys.

She leans in, her tongue playing at her lips – You want to watch friend eat my pussy?

Two men walk through the doorway, small bony-framed Cambodians with sparse moustaches, plastic sandals. Booze. Greasy undershirts. One man walks directly for the wide-nose girl – a torrent of Khmer – he grabs her arm and pulls her towards the back room. Wide-nose screams, her fingernails flared into his shoulder. She yanks away from him, runs and drapes her arm around my neck.

Tonight you stay with me! You stay. That man no good! Say you stay with me!

Undershirt-man pauses, then totters over to me with blood-shot eyes, his dark skin oily from the heat and unwash. He spits and brings his face so close I see the concrete dust clinging to the fibres of his moustache. Stink of long camel teeth. The smell of his armpit, cough, a phlegm wad chewed then spat.
He ask if you have weapon. No weapon
. Not in the saving business.

Shlomi says – That's west of the lake. I hear you aren't supposed to go there. No thanks, I'll stay here – he licks the Rizla closed.