Bamboo People (17 page)

“What are they going to do? Send him back into the jungle like this?” Ree Meh asks. She’s using our language, too. Nobody wants to dim the hope in Chiko’s face. Not even me.

“The president didn’t seem too convinced that he wasn’t a spy,” I say. “And now he’s seen our leaders and our camp firsthand. I hope they take it to a vote.”

“What if they do the right thing and let him stay?” Nya Meh asks quietly, handing Chiko a glass of water and three pills. It’s an effort for him to swallow them.

Auntie Doctor considers this option for a minute. “He might have a chance to get home if that happens,” she says finally. “Once he’s strong enough, we’d have to figure out a way to transport him to the clinic where we make replacement legs. His training camp really isn’t too far from there—a long walk uphill and down again on a good road. In fact, I’ll be heading to the clinic in a week or so. If he heals quickly and they let him come along, I could clear him at the checkpoint. Those Thai soldiers owe me a favor or two.”

It takes half a day to get to the clinic. The doctor walks it, but how would Chiko make it there with only one leg? Suddenly an outrageous idea leaps into my head. It sounds so much like something Peh would suggest that I wonder for a second if he’s in the room. He’s in my brain, that’s for sure.
No, Peh,
I tell him silently.
I can’t do that. I won’t.

Chiko is almost asleep now, lulled by the medicine and the sound of low voices in a conversation he can’t understand. He’s shivering, though. “Maybe we could carry him there on a stretcher, like we did before,” Nya Meh says, covering him with a blanket.

“Tu Reh and I could do it,” Ree Meh offers. “We brought him here like that almost all the way. We can do it again.”

“No, my daughter,” the doctor says wearily. “It’s not safe for you, even if we could get a clearance. The men leave me alone because I’m old and I’ve treated so many of them—Burmese, Thai, Karenni. They’re starting to seem the same to me. Boys, all of them. Boys in pain.”

A wave of anger takes my breath away. How dare she say that we Karenni boys are like the Burmese? I’d never storm into a peaceful village to fling a torch on somebody’s roof. But I watched a Burmese soldier do that to my house, and then heard him laugh as I ran.

“The camp won’t let him stay,” I say. “They’ll probably make
me
carry him back to the jungle, where I should have left him in the first place.”

Nya Meh’s voice is gentle. “Don’t look back now,” she says. “You did the right thing.”

“He’d be dead if you hadn’t brought him here,” Auntie Doctor adds. “The infection was bad, and spreading fast. Now he needs to sleep long and hard, and in the meantime I want to teach Nya Meh a bit more about the surgery. You two—off to school.”

My fists are still clenched, and I don’t budge. How did I end up in this mess?

“Won’t you go with me, sister?” Ree Meh asks. She hasn’t moved either, and I can hear the anxiety in her voice. “Please?”

“I want to spend as much time as I can learning from Auntie Doctor before she leaves,” says Nya Meh. “Grandfather wants you to go, Ree Meh. He told me that I didn’t have to.”

Somehow, mysteriously, Ree Meh’s worry over school has extinguished my anger like a bucket of water. “You’ll be just fine,” I tell her. “My sister and I will be there, remember?”

“Maybe I should have stayed in the jungle,” she says glumly.

Ree Meh and I walk out together, leaving the doctor and Nya Meh consulting in quiet voices over a thick medical book. “School’s that way,” I say, pointing down the path with my pole. Standing tensely on the threshold, she reminds me of a hunted deer.

“Your
mua
actually said we had to go after lunch, remember? She’d like it if you gave me a tour of the camp first, Tu Reh, wouldn’t she?”

Her smile is sudden and sweet. Besides, Mua is always scolding me to be more pleasant, and offering a tour of the camp would be hospitable, right?

We stroll side by side down the path. The sun is climbing high behind the mountains, and bamboo leaves on both banks shake lightly in the breeze. A bridge spans the deepest, widest part of the river. It’s a good place to fish. We pass the building that’s used for meetings and a smaller one that serves as our school. The two buildings face each other across an open field where a group of kids are kicking a soccer ball, laughing and joking. Just as I told Chiko, two boys are playing with replacement legs.

Barbed wire borders the camp on one side; the river, edged with bamboo, marks the other side. We’ve built several rickety wooden watchtowers to keep an eye out for invaders. The dense jungle, the threat of attack, and hidden mines keep us away from the Burmese side. An army checkpoint and the threat of arrest block any escape on the Thai side.

The gate in the wire fence is open, and there’s no guard posted there. “Is it always open, Tu Reh?” Ree Meh asks, studying the dirt road that leads away from the entrance.

I nod, remembering the hopes I’d had of escaping into Thailand when we’d first arrived. I talked with Peh of blending in, trying to make a living, saving money to buy some land and plant rice. It didn’t take long to find out how impossible that would be. “Thai soldiers have a checkpoint just around the bend,” I tell her. “If a Karenni is caught anywhere outside the camp without clearance, he’s arrested and handed to the Burmese police.”

Leaning on my pole, I watch the cool, silver river twisting through the valley. It’s the same river that passes through our village. We walked along it to get here. It comes all the way through the jungle, linking us back to the place where I first waded, fished, and learned to swim.

“Look at all that bamboo,” Ree Meh says.

“You should have seen our grove at home, right next to the rice paddies.” I say. “We’re not supposed to plant rice here, you know.”

“But we ate rice for breakfast. And dinner. Where does your
mua
get it?”

“Supplies come twice a month,” I answer. “An American brings rice, oil, dried milk, sugar, soybeans, charcoal—things like that. Another man, a missionary from Europe, brings kerosene, medical supplies, and shoes.”

“Generous people,” Ree Meh says.

I shrug. “We Karenni have always made our own way. Now we owe our lives to these foreigners.”

“My sister would say we owe our lives to God,” says Ree Meh.

“Even after what they did to her?” I ask.

There’s a loud exclamation of disgust behind us, and we spin around. Sa Reh is standing there. For a wild second, hope rises inside me—maybe he’s finally giving me the benefit of the doubt. But when our eyes meet, his are burning like coals.

He turns to Ree Meh, teeth grinding the betel mix tucked in his cheek. “What did they do to your sister?”

“I’m not sure,” Ree Meh answers. “I can only guess.”

“Tell me what you know!” he commands.

I can tell Ree Meh’s getting angry. “Ask her yourself if you’re so curious!” she flings back.

“I don’t need to.” He takes a step closer to me, and I smell the mix of nuts, tobacco, coconut, green leaves, and limestone paste on his breath. “I can’t believe you’d actually bring a Burmese soldier to a girl who went through something like that. Didn’t you think about the memories she must have about that uniform?”

“I did,” I say. “But—”

Sa Reh interrupts. “No excuses. How could you do it? How could you take that soldier to her? Risking your life and theirs—for his?”

“Our lives were already in danger,” Ree Meh says. “They were coming for us, didn’t you hear that?”

“He could have left the soldier and brought you here to safety.”

“That ‘soldier’ is just a boy! He’s younger than you are, if you hadn’t noticed.”

Ree Meh and Sa Reh are shouting at each other while I’m standing there doing nothing, saying nothing.

“He’s an enemy!” Sa Reh bellows.

“He would have died if we’d left him there!” Ree Meh yells.

Now Sa Reh’s eyes are on me. “That scum should have died,” he says, and walks away.

Before Ree Meh and I have a chance to talk, Oo Meh comes running up. “Mua wants you both home for lunch. And then it’s time for school.” She looks over her shoulder at Sa Reh’s retreating figure. “Why was
he
so mad?”

“I don’t know,” I answer.

But I do know.

Thanks to my decisions in the jungle, I’ve lost my best friend in camp, probably forever.

Mua tells us the council has chosen a site for the girls and their grandfather. It’s close to the river, a bit away from the other huts.

“Unmarried girls need privacy, so it’s good that it’s set apart,” she says, serving us dried fish and rice. “Tu Reh, you must help them build it. After school, of course. And you’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep until it’s ready.”

“Yes, Mua,” I answer. Hard work will take my mind off my worries, and besides, I don’t mind spending every minute I can with … working.

Building the hut, of course. Making it secure for the girls and their grandfather.

After lunch my sister, Ree Meh, and I walk to school. “I told the other girls about you this morning,” Oo Meh says, clutching Ree Meh’s hand. “They can’t believe how brave you were, living in the jungle with just your sister and your grandfather. I told them how you used to hunt your own food, and they want to hear all about it.”

Ree Meh looks slightly less anxious, and I ruffle my sister’s hair. When did she get so smart?

The teacher enrolls Ree Meh with a welcoming smile. Like Chiko, he stepped on a mine when he was a boy. Now he bounds around the classroom on his prosthetic, telling jokes and waving his hands in the air as he teaches history, math, ethics, science. If he weren’t so interesting, I might put up more resistance to my parents’ school-until-you’re-eighteen rule, but he’s one of the best teachers around.

Thanks to Oo Meh’s buildup, the other girls greet Ree Meh warmly. They come up to her at recess as if she’s a magnet. I watch her standing with her chin up, fielding questions about life in the jungle, and admire how she hides her nervousness.

Meanwhile, some of the boys gather around me.

“Did you really save that Burmese boy’s life, Tu Reh?”

I nod.

Someone snickers. “Gotten soft, haven’t you?”

“What does Sa Reh think?” another boy asks.

I shrug and walk away. Sa Reh is easily the best kickboxer in camp, tells the funniest jokes, and once single-handedly killed a king cobra that slithered into church. Younger kids especially look up to him—he takes them fishing and plays games with them for hours when the rest of us won’t. When Sa Reh made me his best friend, this strange new place felt a bit like home. Now what am I going to do?

Thankfully, work on the girls’ new home gets under way that afternoon, and it’s a distraction. Nya Meh is still in the doctor’s hut, but Ree Meh and I start cutting bamboo. We use Mango to haul the heavy loads. The grandfather sits on the bank, weaving smaller bamboo strips into a lattice for the windows and door.

“We work together well,” I tell Ree Meh quietly, so the old man can’t hear.

She smiles, moving her braid over her shoulder to keep it out of the way.

Oo Meh stops by to “help.” “The council decided to let the whole camp vote on Chiko,” she informs us.

“How did you find out?” Ree Meh asks.

“This one knows it’s going to storm before the clouds do,” I say. I’m relieved because the news means that the council wasn’t unanimous about taking Chiko back to the jungle right away.

I can’t ruffle Oo Meh’s wispy hair like I usually do when I tease her because she’s somehow managed to weave it into a thin, scraggly braid. She tosses it around every five minutes and stays glued to our side, chatting constantly and focusing on Ree Meh’s every move. I can’t blame my sister. I’m having trouble controlling my own eyes.

When it gets too dark to work, the old man heads to the place where he’s staying, and the three of us go back to my hut.

Nya Meh’s already there. “How is he?” Ree Meh asks her sister.

“On the outside, healing well. But on the inside? Sad. Quiet. The doctor asked for you to stay there tonight, Tu Reh. And so did Chiko.”

Not again! Well, what do I have to lose? Besides, my mat is still there and I don’t really have any other place to sleep.

This time Chiko’s awake when I get there.

“Feeling better?” I ask.

“A bit. Not much to do except think about this, though.” He gestures to where his leg used to be. “Where were you all day?”

“At school. My parents are making me go until I’m eighteen. My friend—a boy I know—stopped when he was fourteen. He spends time with the men while I’m stuck doing lessons with a bunch of children.”

“I’d love to study something—something hard to take my mind off this. You learn in Karenni, right?”

“Right. Teacher tries to teach us English, but we’re hopeless at it.”

“My
peh
taught me English. I can read and write it, too.”

I yawn and spread out my sleeping mat. “Maybe we’ve got some English books in the schoolroom.”

His eyes get wide behind his glasses. “Books? Really? I haven’t read a book in months.
Months,
Tu Reh!”

“I’ll ask tomorrow. Go to sleep now, Chiko.”

But he’s not done yet. “Your teacher any good?”

“He’s not bad. In fact, you should meet him. He stepped on a mine years ago. Lost his knee, too, but he can still chase and catch the little ones just fine.”

“Really?”

“Really. Now go to sleep.”

“One more thing.” He hesitates. “What’s going to happen to me, Tu Reh? Do your leaders think I’m a spy?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “The council called a camp vote for this Friday. They’ll decide what to do with you then.”

“Will they—will they kill me?”

“No. I don’t know what they’ll do, but they won’t murder you.”
They might make me carry you back to the jungle and leave you there,
I think, but I don’t say it out loud.

He sighs in relief and settles down to sleep. I shake my head as I stretch out on my mat. This boy believes everything I tell him. For his sake, I hope I’m right.