Curse of the Pogo Stick (17 page)

“You’re going in the morning?”

“Everything’s done here so we’ll join the big march tomorrow. Tonight’s our farewell party. I’ve been sent to wake you and drag you to it.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Not yet. First I have to…”

“Cut out my tongue. I know. But I can’t imagine why you’d want to.”

“Don’t!” The knife returned and this time there might have been a slight nick. She was very drunk and the words left her mouth angrily and badly pronounced. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’ve had too much – ”

She sat up and stabbed the knife into the sleeping platform. Its blade reflected the flicker of the candle.

“I know I’m drunk. It’s temporary. So don’t talk to me like one of the addicts behind the Phonsavan market. Tomorrow I’ll be sober but I won’t recover from your humiliation if you keep lying to me. I need to know what happened up there, and don’t give me the demon…unspoken…cremation shit. Show me some respect.”

Siri saw the fire in her beautiful eyes and fell deeply in love with her. He swung his legs off the platform and felt the pain of his splinter wounds. He sat for a moment staring at the ground. She remained silent beside him.

“If I tell you,” he said, “you have to swear to me on the souls of your ancestors that you won’t tell Elder Long or the others. And I mean now and for ever.”

“Is it so terrible?”

“Promise!”

“All right.”

“Say the words.”

“I swear not to tell.” She pulled her legs under her and sat cross-legged on the platform. Siri chose to stand to tell his tale, prancing back and forth.

“I’m a cynic,” he began, “albeit a cynic who is constantly confounded by the truth. I have to be convinced before I believe. When a man tells me in theory it’s possible to examine the genetic make–up of blood to identify a killer, I ask to see it in practice so I can believe it. That’s why I shall never become a better surgeon while I’m stuck in this country. When a man tells me the world will improve if everyone works together and shares its wealth, I may appreciate the theory but I expect evidence, some proof that man is capable of such selflessness. That’s why I’m such a poor communist.

“So when I’m told a demon has assaulted a village girl I need to see evidence that such a thing is possible. Getting zapped in the front yard was quite convincing and the fact that she carried a baby the size of a small buffalo was impressive. But I have to eliminate the other possibilities and be left with only one, that she was impregnated by a demon. I consider how else these feats could be arrived at.

“My biggest problem as a practising cynic, however, is that I’m aligned, against my will and better judgment, to another world. I’m connected to a world of spirits and souls and gods and no matter how hard I try to disprove this world, I know it exists. I don’t know how it’s possible, but, damn it, it’s there. So I resort to the rules of the supernatural. I begin by seeing whether the incredible can be explained through their rules. And when that world tells me something is off-kilter and implausible, I know I have to think as a human. I have to use logic. My visit to the Otherworld told me I had to look for earthly solutions to this mystery.

“The only reason I didn’t fathom what really happened to me was that we’re in the middle of nowhere in a village without power. But it should have been obvious when I saw the burn marks and bruises. I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could get a generator all the way up here or have the wherewithal to set up a system. But I recalled hearing a roar from the house and I wondered whether that might have been a generator sound. And the possibility that this was some elaborate trick entered my mind. If that was so, Chamee had to be a party to it. What I got when I walked to the haunted house wasn’t a bolt from the blue, it was an electric shock. The reading of the horns should have told me, the positive and negative charges. Do you know much about electricity?”

“Only what I’ve seen in the city. Not enough.”

Siri’s meanderings were now taking him in wide circles around Bao. The breeze from his body fanned the candle every time he passed.

“Well, I asked myself how a young village girl would have the knowledge and access to equipment to be able to set this up. I hypothesized that she had to have an accomplice. Who, I wondered, would know about electronics and mechanics?”

“A soldier,” Bao filled in.

“Right. And why would a soldier be secretly holed up in a house, afraid to be seen? And why would Chamee go along with it?”

Siri gave Bao a few seconds to consider this.

“A deserter,” she said at last, “and a lover. One of our own who had come home on leave one time.”

“And?”

“And made her pregnant.”

The turning over of Bao’s mind had cleared her whiskied head. She was fully alert now and able to join in Siri’s logic.

“But no, Yeh Ming. There isn’t shame in that,” she said. “Our young people aren’t discouraged from having sex, and accidents happen.”

Siri stopped his pacing and waited for her to arrive at the same conclusion he’d reached. She talked it through with herself.

“Why should they go to so much trouble to hide the truth?” she asked herself. “What could have possibly forced them to set up such a complicated lie? Unless…”

“Yes!”

“Oh my lord. They share a family name. They’re from the same clan.”

She had hit the nail squarely on the head. The ultimate Hmong taboo. Two people of the same surname could not have carnal knowledge. Even if they knew of no living family connections, that tie, traced all the way back through the legends to the beginning of time, still barred intimacy within the same bloodline. It was a rule as rigid as if the couple were full brother and sister and it carried the same stigma that such a relationship would hold in the West. Any couple who ignored this taboo and their children after them would be despised and ostracized.

“Who was the boy?” she asked.

“I don’t think it would help anybody to know that. All you need to understand is that he was not much more than a child himself. When I arrived at the house yesterday he was in a terrible state. The girl’s time had come and she was bleeding badly. The babies were too much for her. Not only were they large children but there were two of them. Neither she nor the boy had any idea what to do. She couldn’t possibly have birthed the babies by herself. I had to cut them out.”

“And Chamee didn’t survive this.”

Siri was silent.

“She did? She’s alive?”

“She is.”

“You lied to Elder Long.”

“Not exactly. He heard what he wanted to hear, I merely told him Chamee was no longer there.”

“But how were you able to help her? You had no equipment, no medicine.”

“Ah, but I did.”

“I saw you go up the hill. You had nothing with you.”

“I had the ceremonial knife. That was a good start.”

“A start? What do you mean?”

“Do you remember your father telling you about the bad spirit beyond the mountain-top?”

“Nobody goes there. It is too steep for farming and my father told us there were evil spirits living there. We didn’t dare explore.”

“Well, he was right. About ten years ago, at the height of the bombing, a plane went down in that valley. It was before your people moved here to this mountain. It crashed into the gully just beyond the peak. The trees had fallen inward on top of it so it wasn’t visible from the air. That’s why the pilots and their cargo were never recovered. It was a transporter, not a fighter, so it was full of equipment. Chamee’s boyfriend discovered it while he was out foraging. It was stocked with canned food.”

“That’s why she didn’t need the meals we made for her.”

“They could have eaten for a year.”

“It all makes sense.”

“There was electrical equipment and medical supplies too. They had antiseptic and sterilized dressings and stitching thread. The boy had brought it all up to the house to prepare for the birth. It’s true he had no idea what to do with most of it. She was lucky. Even if she’d somehow survived the birth I don’t see how she could have raised two babies. She’s a baby herself.”

“So…?”

“I convinced her they would be better taken care of by the older women. She seemed relieved in a way. We took her down to the plane to recuperate. I believe the burden of being a mother might have been more than she could take. Without family support I couldn’t envisage the couple surviving with two babies. The boy was one heck of an electrician, though. He’d trained as an aircraft mechanic with the Americans. Some technician had taught him all he knew about electronics. The boy had it all set up there in the house. He’d run some wires from a generator to the trees above the path. He’d threaded a few dozen uninsulated wires down through the vines with the ends exposed. All he had to do was adjust the current with a rheostat to – You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Not a word. But I get the point. What about the voice? That was the boy?”

“With a little help from an ampli – from a machine that makes sound louder. He’d whisper what he was about to say and she’d mime it.”

Bao shook her head. “I can’t believe how deceitful she was. Even before the baby started to show, Chamee told her father of nightmares and demons, of visits to the Otherworld in her dreams. She planted the seeds in his head back then. Long wouldn’t have thought for a second that his good daughter had broken her promise to her parents not to go with a boy. He was so certain she was a virgin, the only possible explanation was that she’d been possessed.

“He desperately wanted a shaman to come here to release her but travelling between villages was hard after the changeover. Her belly grew so fast and so big we were sure she’d burst if we didn’t get some help. Chamee moved up to the old cottage one night and all these signs started to prove she was really possessed. When I tried to go in and get her I got that same electric shock as you. We’d given up on her. That’s when the guides told us Yeh Ming was on the PL side and that you’d be passing through Xiang Khouang. It was like a miracle. Long had told us stories about you – about Yeh Ming – when we were little.”

“I doubt whether – ”

They were interrupted by a very drunk Long who fell in through the doorway like a felled fence post. He lay with his face on the earthen floor, laughing. Siri and Bao helped him to his feet.

“Now what – as if I didn’t know – were you two up to in here all by yourselves?”

“We weren’t…” Siri blushed.

“Nah, don’t deny it. If I didn’t have three wives myself…” He laughed. “But there’s plenty of time for that old hanky-panky. You!” – he grabbed Siri’s arm – “Are our guest of honour. We need you.”

He dragged Siri out into the moonlight with Bao tripping happily behind. They were halfway to the main house when it occurred to Long he should relieve himself. Despite the abundance of nature all around them, he walked unsteadily to the latrine, saying something about ‘order’ and ‘discipline.’ He instructed Siri to stay where he was. Bao joined him.

“Last question before we get too drunk to care,” she said. “The house. Why did you order us to burn it?”

“There was ammunition, flares, some kind of defoliant, and a few guns in there. The boy had carried them up from the plane in case they needed to defend themselves. From an entire army by the looks of it. If our rescue party ever makes it here and discovers you have a stash of American arms in your village, you’d be classified as rebels. They’d double the troops out after you and they’d have an excuse to shoot the lot of you on sight, irrespective of whether you were women or old folks. Goodness knows it’s going to be hard enough for you to get away without that.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

“Didn’t I tell you to pack that in?” Long shouted, returning from his business. He staggered into them and held onto their waists. “And what about your weak-minded assistant?” he asked. “Do you think we should invite him along to our party too?”

“Ooh, I don’t think he’ll be awake until at least tomorrow,” Bao told him with a slightly guilty look on her face.

“Now what have you done to him?” Siri asked, not really caring.

“You remember when we first met?”

“The sleeping poison?”

“It was for his own safety. It seems whenever he’s conscious he gets himself into trouble.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Siri laughed.

They strode into the main house. Candles and lamps burned everywhere, giving the building a warm and jolly feeling it hadn’t known since Yeh Ming’s arrival. Dia played the
geng
with so much love the music seemed to throw its arms around the newcomers when they entered. Phia and Ber danced to some entirely different music only the two of them could hear. Despite the comparative youth of the evening, Chia had already collapsed in front of the family altar like an offering and was snoring contentedly. As was her way, she would wake refreshed in a few minutes and start all over again. Zhong’s reincarnated father lay on his back cycling his legs through the air.

New senior wife Nhia collected her husband at the door and steered him to his place at the feast. The village’s entire stock of rice whisky filled a twenty-gallon drum. They wouldn’t be taking it with them so they had no choice but to finish it tonight. There was more roast pork than a man could get through in a lifetime and the vegetable garden had been pillaged. Only the house spirits were down. They moped in the beams and rafters like spoiled children. They knew this was their last night of life after death. Like the Hmong they protected, they had nowhere to go.

A MOMENT FROZEN IN COTTON

S
iri awoke with the type of head a man who drinks half a barrel of rough rice liquor deserves. His mouth was as dry as the average skeleton’s eye socket. He tried to swallow and his windpipe constricted the way an empty balloon might if you sucked instead of blew. His old heart quivered and his bladder felt solid as a bowling ball. If ever Laos were to establish a temperance league he felt sure he could be its poster boy. He rolled painfully onto his back. Something was missing from the collage of life around him. The sun was sawing through the loose thatch, which meant the morning mist had already burned off and he’d overslept. That led him to the conclusion that he’d probably reneged on his promise to help with the morning chores.