Mr. Bones (25 page)

He drew her to the bed and held her, both of them clothed, and said, “Tell me about your mother's farm.”

“In the village,” she said. “Grow rice, have chicken . . .”

And as she spoke, he could see it, greeny-gold in the sunshine, the graceful huts on stilts, in the thickness of banana trees, under the feathery umbrellas of palms. The rice fields, banked in big squares, filled with water, mirrored the blue sky. Her mother stood over the smoking cookstove under the house, stirring the noodles in the wok. The most durable sort of human happiness. Song mentioned the children playing, her brother on his bicycle, and Osier could tell that it meant everything to her.

“Go on,” he said when she hesitated.

He easily fitted himself into that landscape. And when he fell asleep in Song's arms he dreamed of the village, and a detail she had not given him, a fierce dog barking at him.

He woke in the darkness. He was still dressed. Song had gotten into the bed. She'd had a shower. Her dress was folded on a chair.

“I'm going to the States,” he said.

He could tell even in the darkness, by the way she breathed, that she disapproved. She held his arm as if restraining him, though he hadn't moved.

“If I don't go, they make trouble for me.”

Song became thoughtful, then said, “What trouble?”

“Telling stories about me,” he said, and because he was ashamed of speaking this way, he whispered, “They no like me.”

He could tell he had her full attention, as when he had said, “I have money,” and her lips had moved as though in prayer.

She said, “They make you go home?”

He didn't answer, but his silence was like a statement, and Song's eyes were on him.

“Who say?”

“My boss.” He had to keep it simple—language was always a problem. But when he uttered the formula, she held on tighter, and he felt the desperation in her fingers.

“Boss,” she said disgustedly.

He regretted the word, his lame excuse, but the truth—Joyce, his pension, his early retirement, all of it—was too complicated to explain. He longed for the time when no more explanations would be necessary.

“Don't worry.”

“I coming back, honey.” She sang it, as a kind of jeer, and that stung him. Her English had improved and was lethal in its accuracy when she was mocking.

Song said nothing more. The air conditioner restarted, filling the room with clatter. Instead of breaking the spell, the noise made any more talk impossible, and the mutter, with the blast of cool air, roused them. They made love joyously, but with defiance, too. Afterward he thought, How many more years of work? One or two. How many of life? Twenty or more. He was not old—Song had shown him that he was just beginning. He wanted more of life, more of Song. He craved that simple golden world of greenery that she took for granted, that he'd once imagined to be unattainable.

Even in Bangkok she was an oddity, and together they were a greater oddity, but they were alike.

In the morning he called Song a taxi, and he rode the shuttle with Fred and Larry. He was aware of their scrutiny. Had Fred said anything?

Fred said, “We're thinking of hitting a few clubs tonight. Want to join us?”

This from the churchgoer who had a special relationship with Jesus. All that Osier could think of was his plan to go back to the States, to announce his intentions. He had no words for what he felt, no name for the state he was in, no way of saying what it was that had happened in the night—none that made any sense to him. If this was love, it was something he had never known before. He sorrowed for Joyce, for himself—not for Song. He knew that when the period of grieving was over she would have everything she wanted.

“I can't go,” he said. This was the same man who'd gotten him to go to church. But this was different.

“We figured,” Larry said.

Osier looked at them both and said, “I know what you're thinking. But there's nothing wrong with me.”

Where had that come from? He was sorry he'd blurted it out. That they had no reply was like a challenge to him.

He spent the day finishing the quarterly accounts and making arrangements for flights back to the States. He called Haines and asked for discretionary leave, a week. He called Joyce, saying that he would be coming. And that night he slept well, knowing that he'd made his decision.

His phone rang in the darkness. He guessed it was Joyce, perhaps fretting, a confusion in the time difference. But it was Song. She had never called at this hour, and whenever she called she was circumspect. But she sounded certain—odd for this predawn hour.

“Boy?”

He blinked at the name. “Yes?”

“No more trouble.”

“It's four o'clock in the morning,” he said. “Where are you?”

“No more trouble.”

Her self-assurance gave him hope. Even if she was not love, she was life, and she had allowed him to discover something about himself. He was someone else, not the man he had been. Away from home, in the hot night of this city, he had become transformed. It was a glimpse of difference he would never have found in the States. It made him wonder, and that wonderment was his strength. Hearing Song's voice, he yearned for her.

“I want to see you.”

“I want see you,” she said.

“See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Then he slept deeply, consoled by her confident voice.

 

Neither Fred nor Larry was in the lobby when the company shuttle drew up. The doorman said he hadn't seen them. Normally they were waiting for Osier, holding cups of coffee from the urn in the lobby.

He called Fred's cell phone number but got a recorded message. He tried Larry.

“It's me,” Osier said when Larry answered. “Shuttle's here.”

Larry sighed, a kind of whistling, and gasped a little, sounding like a weak child. “I'm at the hospital,” he said. “I'll be all right. But I don't know about Fred. He's in tough shape.”

“What happened?”

“Couple of guys jumped us last night. They went after Fred. If I hadn't intervened they would have killed him.”

“What, a robbery?”

“No robbery. Just”—Larry's voice was weary, wounded— “mayhem. Screaming mayhem. The guys came at us with knives. They cut Fred real bad. You gotta call Haines. And Fred's wife. Maybe the embassy, too.”

Osier stood in the courtyard of the hotel, the great hot city roaring around his head. The driver signaled from the van, querying with his hands, a gesture that asked, “Shall we go?”

Osier went up to his room but could not summon the nerve to break the news to Haines. To comfort himself, he called Song. “Big trouble,” he said, and he was going to say more but he didn't trust his unsteady voice.

“No trouble,” Song said.

He had hardly started speaking when she cut him off with uncharacteristic efficiency. She knew everything—the bar, the injuries, even the name of the hospital where the men had been taken. And after this explanation, “I want see you.”

He had once thought, I can choose. People were happy who believed that. He was miserable, because he was no longer ignorant, because he knew he had no choice, and such misery seemed like a guarantee that life went on and on.

“Why did you do this?”

She hadn't understood. She said, “Wiv my knife. Wiv my friend.”

He said, “I don't know,” and the panic in his tremulous voice chastened him. Osier dropped his arm. He didn't want to know how things would turn out. That was an unfair abbreviation, like knowing in advance the day of your death. He tried to be calm. He lifted the phone to his face and said it again.

“But I know,” Song said, with a steady voice of utter assurance, of insistence, taking possession of the whole matter. “Never mind. I love you.”

The manly fury in her voice was dark, even the word “love” was bloody and hellish. He was terrified by her certainty.

“I want see you,” she said.

“No.” And when he said it, he heard Song snarl into the phone. The awful noise of objection was like the crackle of a harsh hot light, exposing everything he'd ever said and done, burning away his shadow. “I've got to make some calls.” She made the noise again. “Okay—later. Siamese Nights. Where are you now?”

“I downstairs. Waiting you.”

L
OOKING FOR BIG
game, I had walked all day with the spearman Enoch through the low prickle bush and the bulging head-high termite mounds in the sand hills, kicking through clusters of black pebble-like scat. I could see frantic bird prints, and the scoring, like finger grooves, of the light gravel by thrashing snakes, but saw no animal larger than the hares that had left that scat and the marks of their pads in the sand among the blowing grass. No tracks of lions or hyenas, not even dogs.

“I will tell you,” Enoch said, sounding ashamed, almost fearful. Then he explained.

 

We were asked, my brother and I, to take the elder, Noah, to the hospital at the boma, sixty-five miles away, in my brother's vehicle. It was a road of potholes and detours, and halfway there, shaken by the ruts, his swollen belly paining him, Noah died. This was the beginning of everything, though we didn't know it. At the time it was just a body to be disposed of.

Noah had no family. This was a problem. Among our people death is the occasion for a day of old specific rituals, first the washing of the body, smearing it with ocher, then wrapping it with herbs in a blanket, some chanting by the other elders, and finally carrying the body into the bush, where it is left to be eaten by animals, the lion, the leopard, the wild dogs, the hyenas. Dogs can be fierce in packs, but hyenas are the most thorough and will return to eat everything but the blanket.

We say, “The day the old woman disappears is the day the hyena shits gray hair.”

The family pays for the funeral, and this includes the cost of the blanket, the strings of beads, the twists of herbs, a clay pot of beer, and the red ocher–smearing. The total can be a cow, or a month's wages for someone who works at the boma.

“He's dead,” my brother said, stopping the car.

But Noah did not seem completely dead. We heard a rattle rise from his throat to his nose, the last of his life bubbling from his lips, and very soon he was silent and so skinny he seemed deflated.

The day was ending in a low portion of reddened sky, and we sat by the roadside, thinking the same thing: that he had no family, no one to bear the cost, and that the hospital at the boma would not compensate us for the journey, because he had died on the way. He was dead, and so he was ours.

Sitting on this verge of the bush road in previous years, we were usually passed by a speeding vehicle, a Land Rover on a night drive, hunters who'd use lights. Or creeping past us, the shadowy figures of poachers, rifles slung across their backs, heading into the last of the day, that red skirt of light and the gilded trees. We saw none of these men as we hesitated here. We were used to their movements, because we were hunters too. We sat as though in the heart of a dead land, only a few baboons creeping toward a tamarind tree, to climb it for the night. But hunting had been bad, so we used our hunting vehicle for transport, as a bush taxi.

We couldn't go farther. And what was the point in carrying the dead man to his empty hut in the village?

“That tree,” my brother said. I knew what he meant.

A fever thorn at a little distance looked important, singular in its size, a fiery witch tree among the tufted scrub.

Without discussing the matter we dragged the body from the back seat. It flopped like a sack on the stony ground. We arranged it, stretching it out, and with each of us holding an end, we bumped it through the bush to the thorn tree, where we let it drop near the rounded tower of a termite mound. I was uneasy with the face upturned, and so I rolled the body onto its belly, its nose in the dust. It was warm under my hand, and a brownish liquid ran from the mouth.

“We should eat something,” my brother said.

We had brought bread and chicken meat and fruit for the trip, but neither of us could swallow. Even a sip of water choked us, though we were thirsty.

Back in our village, no one asked what had happened. Noah had no family to inquire. People assumed that we had brought him to the boma, that we had been paid. We didn't volunteer the information that he had died, that we'd dragged him under a tree and left him.

After a week, feeling guilty, we drove back to the witch tree to make sure he'd been eaten. But he was swollen and stinking, still whole, his body bursting his shirt, his bracelets cutting his flesh, ants on his face and scouring his eyes. Fearing that he'd be found, we dug a hole and buried him, thinking, Where are the animals?

Burial in a hole was something new to us, but a necessity. The body broke apart like overcooked meat as we tumbled it into the pit.

From that day, things began to go wrong. The first was the vehicle, problems with the motor that made no sense—leaks, belts decaying and breaking. Milk thickened and went sour when I drank it. Clay pots cracked like biscuits, the thatch roof rotted, my cows stopped eating and two died, my youngest son developed a fever. My brother's experiences were no better, leaks, cracks, decay, and illness visiting his hut too.

My son died. It was a sadness, the fever worsening until he coughed out his life. And he was part of my wealth, a forager and a herd boy. My brother's wife was found with another man. She had to be beaten, and she was too injured to cook or work after that. The guilty man was ordered to pay a fine—a blanket, a cow, a purse of money, a thickness of copper bracelets, a gourd of beer. But he vanished into the bush, and my brother's wife had to be sent back on her bad leg to her family in disgrace.

My son's was the first death in our village in more than a year. He was buried in the traditional way: the usual ceremony and the body left in a field for the lions and hyenas. But a week went by and my son had not been eaten. I was so sorry to see him bulging in the blanket and disfigured, rotting there, like Noah under the witch tree.