Saving Fish From Drowning (26 page)

The soldiers ordered the people out of the car. As they scrambled to obey, one soldier barked that they were to stay with the car, not move away. The soldiers leaned into the car and patted the seats, the floor pads. They lifted out the backseats and ran their hands up the back cushion. They violently pried open the side panels on the doors. The passengers looked as though they were on the verge of either breaking down or running for their lives.

And then, all at once, they were told to get back in. One of the soldiers grunted, and the driver hurried to start the engine. In a few seconds, the car was gone, heading toward China. Now my friends could see a sign posted on the side of the checkpoint, written in Chinese, Burmese, Thai, and English: “The penalty for smuggling drugs is death.”

This made some of my friends wonder whether they had inadvertently brought in any illegal substances. The polar fleece vest, Wyatt remembered, and sat up. Had he searched all the pockets, the secret ones as well? Was there a forgotten marijuana joint in one of them?

Bennie thought of a bottle into which he had thrown prescription pills of all kinds, in case of emergencies; some of the pills were Darvocet. Was that related to heroin? Did that count as drug smuggling, a reason to line him up against a dusty wall and fill him with bullets?

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Heidi had a similar fear. She was tallying up the items that might be considered drug-related: the syringes, the multiple bottles of pills, and the tubing, the kind used by heroin addicts to pump up their veins. What else did she have? She wondered how she would be able to survive in a prison, let alone face imminent death alone.

It crossed Vera’s mind that some of her compatriots might have been less circumspect about the safety of others. Moff, for example, that so-called bamboo grower, had been a bit too keen to see the open markets where drug dealing was done. She stared hard at him.

He was reading a book. She pictured him still reading, as they stood shackled in the dock in a closed courtroom, listening to unknown charges read aloud in Burmese.

Moff pretended to read, but kept an eye out for what was happening. Best not see too much. He had heard that the soldiers could be easily corrupted. Perhaps they were not searching for contraband at all, but stuffing their own blocks of heroin into tight spaces. Their contact on the China side of the border, another corrupt worker, would find it and send payment back in another car that had been duly “searched.”

Esmé threw her mother’s scarf over Pup-pup. Marlena squeezed her daughter’s hand, and reflexively, she also squeezed her left hand, which held Harry’s. Harry squeezed back. He was not overly worried. Tonight was the night, he was thinking. Esmé would have healthy little Pup-pup to sleep with, and he would have Marlena to play with. He reached into his pocket with his free hand, extracted a mint, and popped it into his mouth.

Walter returned to the bus. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have been given permission to proceed.” By then, several members of the group had developed upset stomach, which they thought was the result of high stress from waiting at the checkpoint. But in fact, unbeknownst to them,
Shigella bacillus
had finally multiplied in sufficient numbers 1 7 7

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to besiege and scour the linings of their bowels. This was the souvenir of the now forgotten meal served at a restaurant on the way to Stone Bell Temple.

Our travelers went ever deeper into Burma. The fields now resembled crazy quilts, with irregularly shaped plots and borders that never managed to run a straight line. The fields had been passed down in families, and their original boundaries had been marked by the natural growth of bushes. In those colorful fields stood haystacks shaped like stupas. Along streambeds, graceful ladies leaned over huge buckets and splashed themselves as part of their twice-a-day bathing ritual. Tiny children perched on water buffaloes, having already mastered perfect balance on a furry hump.

Dusk was approaching, as marked by the smell of smoke. Fires for the evening meal were being lit. A haze rose from each household and hovered over the land like a blanket of benediction. My friends turned and saw that the banks of the hills were the color of chilies, sharp tastes that brought tears to the eyes. Soon this deepened to blood red, and then the sun dipped past the end of the fields, the land and sky turned black, save for a slice of moon, a colander of stars, and the golden smoke of cooking fires.

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THE JACARANDAS

The overhead lights of the bus came on, a feeble green, casting a pickled pallor upon the faces of my fellow travelers.

On the last leg, during the climb up the Burma Road into

Lashio, the exhaust system on the bus had malfunctioned, and toxic fumes were sucked through the air-conditioning; my friends were made stupid with headache and nausea. Walter noted that even the noisiest ones—Wendy, Moff, Bennie, and Vera—had quieted into a daze. Then Mr. Joe, the usually morose driver, cried out that he had seen a Nat riding toward him on a white horse. Walter ordered that they pull over for fresh air. All the men tumbled off the bus, searching for privacy in the pitch-dark night and unknown vegetation. The women preferred to wait until they arrived at the hotel, which Walter promised was only a half-hour away. It was actually forty-five minutes, but he knew that would have sounded unbearably long.

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For once, Harry did not need to use a loo. But he, too, left the bus, to clear his head. He and Marlena were suddenly at odds with each other, and he could not fathom why. In his mind, he had simply tried to show a bit of affection—this was in the way of rubbing her rump—and she had recoiled, as if he had been trying to sodomize her in front of her dozing daughter. She shot him a look, a castrating look. His ex-wife used to aim such a look at him frequently toward the end of their marriage, and he was an expert at interpreting it. It meant: “Not if you were the last sperm bank on earth.” Yet the night before, Marlena had been as passionate as he had been, he was certain of it. There was absolutely no reluctance there. She had reciprocated on the sidewalk of Ruili, providing fully fifty percent of their physics of frottage. Why this sudden turnabout?

The look Marlena gave him was actually one of mortifying distress. She, along with several others on the bus, was starting to feel the cramping effects of dysentery as it prepared to make its inexorable descent. How could she tell him, especially in front of Esmé, the reason that their ardor needed to be put on hold? Even if Esmé were not there, of all things to put a damper on romance, not this.

Dear God, the agony, the inconvenience.

Rupert, Moff, and Bennie hurried off with feeble flashlights in search of a spot where they might have solid footing. Here, I averted my eyes. I would like to point out, however, the highly unfortunate coincidence that what an American takes to be an ideal outdoor toilet is what some Nats—perhaps the one who died of intestinal malaise—consider to be home sweet holy home, in this case, a small grove of jacaranda trees, still leafy in winter but missing their magnificent mane of lilac-colored blossoms. Cross-culturally, mistakes were made, unintentional to be sure, and nothing would have come of it had Rupert not yelled out: “Daa-ad! Dad! Do you have toilet paper?” He cursed, pulled out the paperback from his jacket pocket, 1 8 0

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and reluctantly ripped out pages he had already read. “Never mind!”

he yelled again.

Thus shaken from a drinking game, two Nats in the form of military police jumped to their feet. Earlier they had left their guard posts and sneaked into the field, so that they might smoke cheroots and get drunk on palm toddy. The soused men shouted in Burmese with the prerogative of those on guard. “What the fuck’s going on out there?”

Walter, hearing their curses, had no desire to discern whether they were farmers or spirits. He summoned the rest-stop takers to re-board quickly. Trousers were yanked up, dark figures hobbled toward the vehicle while tugging on their zippers. But Harry, happy wanderer and slow pisser, was oblivious of all of it. He was farther down the road, gazing at brilliant pinpricks of stars, when he heard the commotion. He glanced back and saw the others mounting the bus.

Time to walk back. He assumed the same leisurely pace that had taken him there. A second later, the bus engine started, and the rear brake lights glowed red. What’s their big hurry? Harry began to walk a bit faster. A sharp pain shot through his right knee. He bent down and clutched where it throbbed. Old ski injury, the onset of arthritis.

Drat, he was getting old. Well, no use aggravating it further. He slowed to a walk again, deciding he would simply have to apologize for the delay once he reached his companions. But instead, when he was some twenty feet away, much to his astonishment, the bus pulled off.

“Hey there!” he shouted while hobbling forward. The bus belched black fumes, and in reeling from this noxious assault, Harry leapt to the right and fell into a shallow ditch, landing on his left shoulder and in a manner not conducive to proper arm rotation. A few moments later, he climbed out, coughing and swearing. Was this a joke?

Surely, it had to be, and a wretched one at that. He rubbed his shoulder. He’d be lucky if he had not torn his rotator cuff. All right, ha, 1 8 1

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ha, ha. Any moment now, they would stop and turn back. They had better do it quick. He waited a bit more. Come on. He imagined hearing the hiss of the bus door opening. “Get your bum in here,” he expected Moff to say. And Harry would launch himself at his chum’s torso in a fury of mock punches. But his expectations of reprising the jokes of their youth dwindled, as the red brake lights of the bus grew smaller and dimmer, then disappeared completely, as did the blackened road before him.

“Damn!” Harry said. “Now what?” And as if in answer, two

drunken policemen in green fatigues rushed from the fields with torchlights and rifles trained at his face.

WALTER HAD NEVER MADE a mistake like that. He was usually fastidious about ensuring that all passengers were accounted for. Before Mr. Joe drove off, Walter had turned on the garish overhead light to perform the count. The eyes of the nauseated throbbed, and they groaned and covered their faces with their hands. “One, two . . .” He counted off Bennie and Vera, then Dwight and his grumpy wife, Roxanne. Five was the pretty lady, Heidi, who had a cautious manner, much like his girlfriend in Yangon. “Six, seven,”

would be Moff and his son, then came the mother and daughter with the small puppy. . . . Walter paused. Did he just count seven? He was also suffering a bit. He had a frontal headache brought on from inhaling carbon monoxide from the bus exhaust, and this impaired him. Thus, as he made his way back up the right side of the bus, he included in the count a rattan conical hat balanced atop a backpack, the same hat Wendy had purchased for a hundred kyats in the alley.

In bad light, the hat and backpack looked like the head and shoulders of a passenger who had nodded off. “. . . Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,” Walter counted. “All here, off we go.”

Actually, before I tell you what happened to Harry, there is also the 1 8 2

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matter of Marlena to report. She should have been the first to note that Harry was missing. But as you now know, she was concentrating on her stomach cramps, counting the seconds each lasted, as if she were doing Lamaze birthing exercises. In any case, she did not feel like explaining her troubles to Harry, who had left with a cold frown.

She assumed it was a cold frown, when in fact it was merely genuine English puzzlement. Completely understandable on her part, I might add. I’ve always found that the English, as opposed to the Americans, or even the Welsh and Irish, have a severely reduced range of expressions. Pleasure, pain, bemusement—they are signaled by only the slightest changes in facial musculature, practically indecipherable for those who are accustomed to uninhibited expressions of emotions. And people say the Chinese are inscrutable.

But back to the point: When Harry did not resume his place by her side, Marlena concluded he was demonstrating his displeasure with her. She resented that kind of behavior in people, especially men.

The disapproving look of the patriarch galled her, pressed all the neurotransmitters to the area of her brain that controlled survival and defense. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she fumed, convinced now that Harry had the exact same attitude that her father and ex-husband had too often expressed, the withholding of emotions combined with a critical mashing together of the eyebrows.

A few rows up, Bennie had his eyebrows contorted into a frown of pure misery. He hoped he could restrain himself until the bus reached the hotel. He leaned forward and placed his forehead on the padded back of the seat in front of him. As he did so, his right knee came to rest against an inflated pink plastic bag he had stuck in the mesh magazine rack. Inside was the gift of humanity from the wizened woman in the marketplace, a quarter-pound of fermented spicy turnips sloshing about in their juice.