Saving Fish From Drowning (36 page)

“My goodness,” Bennie said to Black Spot in sarcastic syrupy tones. “You’ve certainly taken us on a fun little death march.”

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“Thank you,” Black Spot said.

“When will we reach this place?” Vera asked.

“Soon,” Black Spot answered. “We are walking just a little more this way.”

“Soon,” Vera said with a sigh, and fanned herself with her scarf.

“That’s what he said an hour ago.” She turned to Black Spot again.

“Excuse me, but what
is
your name?”

“You can calling me Black Spot.”

Esmé slumped with a heavy sigh onto a boulder and arranged her face with the weariest of expressions. Pup-pup yelped in sympathy, jumped out of the scarf sling, and licked her young caretaker’s hand.

Esmé let go of the paper umbrella they had bought that morning, and it rolled off to her side. Because she had silently insisted on bringing it, she could not complain. Normally, Marlena would have reproached her and made her carry the object of her impetuous desire until she admitted she was wrong. But this time, Marlena reached over and grabbed the umbrella. It was pure folly to have bought it, and they should have left the cumbersome thing in the truck, but Esmé had said: “We need a parasol in case it’s all hot, and Pup-pup needs some shade.”
Parasol?
Where had Esmé learned such an archaic word? Well, the important thing was that Esmé was finally talking to her again. If she was still upset, it was hard to tell from her mood, which was alternately tired and impatient, then playful and silly with the dog. Still, Marlena worried. What had Esmé actually seen? Had she seen
everything
?

Marlena felt a drop on the top of her head. The humidity made the branches above them laden with dampness, and they were sweating as heavily as Bennie. She tipped the parasol over her head. High above in the canopy, a monkey flew from branch to branch, sending down droplets that drummed on the taut oiled paper. “Hey, Mom,”

Esmé declared with evident pride. “Good thing we bought that umbrella.”

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“You’re absolutely right, Wawa.” Marlena nodded, happy that

Esmé was happy. More drops fell on the umbrella. They reminded Marlena of Harry’s attempt to put out the fire. She thought of the water-soaked dress he had used to flog at the flames, the gray driblets falling on the bed and floor. She pictured Harry standing naked and bewildered, trying to discern the significance of the charred mosquito netting as if it were a Calder mobile in a museum. He seemed so lost and little-boyish. Then she pictured his face, the way he had looked at her before the fire, the raw lust in his eyes and open mouth.

She shivered and giggled. “Mommy!” she heard Esmé call. “Do we have anything to eat? I’m starved.” In an instant, a frisson of motherly propriety washed over her. She dug into her bag for her supply of candy bars and dried fruit.

Esmé picked through the selection, then said, “Can Pup-pup and I have the parasol back? We have drips, too.”

Wyatt had sprawled out lengthwise on a log. Wendy was picking out bits of twigs and leaves from her lover’s thick, wavy hair. She traced his nose, blew flirtatiously on his eyelids, which made him laugh and wave her away. “Stop,” he said. She blew again. “Stop,” he repeated.
“Please.”
She needed his constant attention, the evidence that he adored her as much as she adored him, and she persisted because he had not yet said the actual word “love.” She blew again. To see it from Wyatt’s side, this childish play was suffocating. He wished Wendy would just enjoy the moment rather than work at it. He had found her so much more fun to be with when he first met her and she was so easygoing and did not demand attention but drew it naturally.

Rupert with his flexible young knees sat in a hunch-and-crouch pose in imitation of the natives. He spotted a mammoth tree and wished he could sneak off and climb it. But his father had sternly warned him that he was to stay with the group. He fished his paperback out of his pack and began to read.

Vera used the edge of her scarf to dab at her face. She had been 2 5 4

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mulling over ideas for an invigorating speech to her staff on self-reliance, that old-fashioned word from the days of her great-grandmother. Or maybe she would write a book on the subject. This trip, she imagined herself writing, was the springboard for the book.

“For there I was, a woman of sixty, lacking the lung capacity to climb what amounted to a hundred-storied building. And while I could have asked for help physically, I had to rely on myself mentally. It was as much about mental endurance . . .” She paused to think whether this was true. She was abeam with moisture, and the tip of a fern had inserted itself in her springy cap of hair, so that she looked jaunty and beautiful, like a huntress.

The others were leaning against fallen trees. The creaking and crunching of vegetation had stopped, the heavy breathing had slowed to restful, and silence descended as heavy as thunderclouds.

High above there was the occasional
whoop-whoop
of a monkey—

or was it something more dangerous?

“What kind of wild animals are out here?” Wendy asked, looking into the dense foliage.

Dwight made a boogey-man laugh. “Bwaaaaah! Lions and tigers

and bears, oh my.”

“Actually,” Moff said in a droll tone, “there
are
tigers and bears in Burma.”

Heads turned. “You’re joking,” Wendy said.

Heidi added: “It was mentioned in the materials Bibi put together.

There was a whole section on flora and fauna.”

Moff began to enumerate the animals: “A small barking deer,

tapirs the size of donkeys, gibbons and elephants, of course, oh, and a flying fox, rhinos, and the usual assortment of parrots and peafowl, nasty biting insects, nastier leeches, even nastier spitting cobras, a deadly poisonous krait, kills you in an hour by paralyzing your muscles—not to mention what the bear and the tiger would do once you’re unable to run away.”

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Bennie spoke up. “I’m sure the tour company vetted this area and can guarantee we’re in a safe place.”

Cautious eyes darted about toward dark edges of the forest. Since Lijiang, they had not considered Bennie’s opinions to be that informed. Moving slowly, they lifted their feet, inspected the backs of their legs for blood-sucking, poisonous creatures. “That’s why I wear permethrin-sprayed clothing and hundred percent DEET,” Heidi said.

“You sound like a commercial,” Moff joked.

“And that’s why I’m carrying this,” Heidi added. She held up her improvised walking stick, a long slim branch.

Dwight snickered. “You think
that’s
going to keep you from getting attacked by a tiger?”

“A snake,” she said. “I plant it ahead of where I walk. See?” She turned over a leafy covering. A beetle slick with moisture scurried away. “And that way if there’s a snake or something, it’ll attack the stick first or crawl off.”

The others began rummaging around the forest floor for an appropriately sized stick; Dwight did as well. Thus equipped, they were soon on their way. Every few minutes screeches or curse words pierced the air, signaling that one of them had found a gruesome creature attached to a pant leg. Black Spot would come over and flick the offender off.

“What’s this place we’re going?” Bennie asked. “Is it a village?”

“Not a village, smaller.”

“Smaller than a village,” Bennie mused. “Okay. Hamlet, settlement, outskirts . . . private estate, enclave, gated community . . .

micrometropolis, compound, jail . . .”

Vera laughed at Bennie’s list.

“It is a place,” Black Spot said. “We are calling No Name Place.”

“And how much longer till we get to this No Name Place?”

Bennie asked.

“Very close,” Black Spot promised.

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And Bennie heaved a big sigh. “We’ve heard that before.”

A few minutes later, they stopped and Black Spot pointed toward what appeared to be a creek bed running through the cleft of the mountain. “Just over this,” he said. But as they drew closer, they realized it was a chasm that ran up and down as far as they could see, about twenty feet wide, and frighteningly deep—a dizzying labyrinth of twists and turns that spiraled downward in such a way as to make it impossible to know what dead bottom was. It looked as if the earth’s core had cracked and split the mountain.

“Could be a sinkhole,” Roxanne said. “We saw one in the Galápagos. Six hundred feet deep, that was the guess. No one knew for sure, since everyone who went down to investigate never came back up.”

“Thanks for telling us that,” said Bennie.

Bisecting this abyss was a flimsy-looking bridge made of bamboo slats held together with a network of ropes. The ends were lashed to large tree trunks. It did not convey a sense of architectural competence or engineering rigor. I would say it looked rather like a wooden clothes rack sitting on top of a place mat. Evidently my friends thought so, too.

“They expect us to go over that?” Heidi squeaked.

“It doesn’t look sturdy,” Vera agreed.

“I can do it!” Esmé chirped, twirling her reclaimed parasol.

“You stay right here,” Marlena snapped, and grabbed her daughter’s arm.

Fishbones scrambled to the middle and jumped up and down to

show the tourists that the bridge was safe and strong. He loped easily to the other side, covering the twenty feet in a matter of seconds, then returned halfway and extended his hand.

“It must be safe,” Bennie said to the group. “I bet these places have to pass strict safety standards to be designated a tourism site.”

Moff peered into the ravine, at its great yawning mouth of rocks and scrubby brush. He picked up a stone the size of his fist and 2 5 7

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tossed it in. It hit a ledge, bounced and fell another fifty feet before smashing into another outcropping a hundred feet below. The sound of the object careening downward continued long after they lost sight of it. “I’ll be the human sacrifice,” Moff said. “Just be sure to get some video, so that if I’m killed, you’ll have evidence to sue whoever made this thing.” Roxanne aimed her camcorder. “Think of this as Tarzan’s amazing adventures,” he said. He took several deep breaths, gritted his teeth, and slowly angled forward. When the bridge dipped in the middle, he let go with an elongated warbling shout
—“whoa-OH-ohhh”—
that matched the somersault in his stomach. As soon as he regained his balance, he walked steadily forward; then he called out to Rupert to come next. If his ex-wife could see what they were doing, he would be in jail for child endangerment. “Hang on to the sides,” he advised. “Steady as you go, as smoothly as you can, and adjust your body to the ups and downs, rather than reacting and pushing against it.”

“You mean, don’t do what you did,” Rupert said. The group

watched him stride smoothly forward, hands free like a tightrope walker. “Man, that was cool,” he said when he reached the other side. Black Spot, Salt, and Fishbones noticed how cool.

One by one, the rest traversed the short distance, some slowly, some quickly, others with much coaxing, or with Black Spot leading them forward. Roxanne was the last to cross. She had already handed the camera to Black Spot, who gave it to Dwight, so he could document her rite of passage. Once all were safely on solid ground, they were awash in self-congratulations, gloating and giving instant replays of their own ten seconds of peril, until Heidi reminded them:

“We have to go back over after lunch.” Their elation thus doused, they moved onward.

Still behind them, on the other side of the bridge, were the three young men with their machetes and supplies. Balanced over their shoulders were thick bamboo poles from which hung big twelve-volt 2 5 8

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batteries, a generator frame, the jackets of their guests, and assorted food supplies. One by one, these men deftly went across, and then lowered their loads to the ground. With practiced expertise, one of them began to unwind the knots that tethered the bridge to its tree anchors, while the other two unwound a rope that was off to the side, curled around the trunk of another tree to create a winch. This was the long tail of the bridge. Carefully now, the men lowered the bridge while relaxing the long rope. Down it went, until the bridge hung like a useless ladder on the opposite side. They swung and jostled the tail end of the rope still attached to the bridge until it blended with the lianas of the winding gorge and disappeared. The free end was lashed to the root of a tree that had fallen over, decades before. Ferns hid it completely.

From this vantage point, the people of No Name Place could see the bridge. But no one approaching their secret home from the other side would know a bridge had ever been there. And that was how they kept themselves cut off, hidden in a secret world no one knew existed, they hoped. For the past year, the bridge had been brought up every other week, when they needed supplies and felt there was no risk that soldiers were in the area. If the soldiers discovered the bridge, the Karen people would run toward the deep jaws of the mountain and jump in. Better that than to be caught, tortured, and killed. And if they weren’t able to kill themselves first, if they were caught by the soldiers, they would gouge out their own eyes so they could not watch the soldiers rape their sisters and daughters, or cut the throats of their mothers and fathers. The soldiers, they remembered, liked to smile when they held the knife to make someone rise or lower, as if they were puppet masters pulling the strings of a marionette to retell one of the old Jataka tales of the Burmans.

They feared the soldiers most during the monsoons. The rain beat down the thatches over the tribe’s small verandahs, and they lived in mud and picked off leeches every few minutes. During that season 2 5 9

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they hung bamboo-lattice hammocks in the trees where they sat and slept. It was then that the SLORC soldiers came. They could approach a whole settlement from behind and catch them on the wrong side of a raging stream, unable to escape except into the water. The soldiers, some of them boys of only twelve or thirteen, would stand on the shore, aim their rifles, and laugh when they hit a target and its arms stopped flailing. Sometimes they would toss in a grenade that exploded and sent lifeless bodies and fish floating to the top and then swirling in eddies like lily pads. A few of the people at No Name Place had lost their entire families this way. It was a miracle and a misery that the Great God had spared them.