The Brittle Limit, a Novel (9 page)

Andrew started at this revelation, that Ben
had previously visited the site where he was killed.

Severine picked at the stuffing on the
slashed couch. “If it’s helpful, I do know that he got paid in
cash. And a lot of it.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars for two days
work.”

“Is that good money? It sounds like very good
money.” Andrew didn’t know the going rate for working in a
minefield. His job was filled with risk, but not
take-one-wrong-step-and-you’re-dead kind of risk.

“Yes. Very. He was thrilled.” She picked at a
hangnail on her left thumb, a nervous habit. She looked at her bare
left hand. Her fingernails were unpolished and short, bitten to the
quick.

“Look. This might not be easy. But can you
tell me exactly what happened in the jungle that day? Maybe there’s
something you don’t realize is important.”

“Yes, OK. I can do that.” Severine sat down
on the couch, took one deep breath, then another. She looked around
the chaos in the room and began to recount the afternoon in
Mondulkiri.

*******

For some time, the only sound was the
thwek-thwek of the machete as they moved farther into the grasping
jungle. Rounding a blind corner, they came upon a small sunlit
clearing, a deep inviting pool of water on the far end. Following
Ben into the clearing, Severine looked up, relieved to see the
cloudless blue sky above. The sunlit pool sparkled. A stream
feeding the pool burbled over a short waterfall, its stones covered
with green moss.

Ben said “OK, let’s take a break.”

“Thank God. I’m boiling.”

Ben smiled back at her, his dark eyes
dancing. “I’d rather be hot than covered in bug bites. I don’t
think you want malaria.”

She shrugged. “I’m not so sure. Anything to
cool down.”

Severine sat down on a long flat rock by the
pool and pulled a blue plastic water bottle from the side of her
pack. She drank deeply. Ben dropped his heavy pack on the grass and
crouched down on his haunches, spreading a map on the empty rock
next to Severine. “Alright. Let’s see where we are.”

“Yes, that’d be good to know,” Severine
said.

Ben studied the map in the mid-afternoon sun,
light from the pool reflecting and bouncing on his tan face. He
looked at a compass and his handheld GPS, then tapped a spot on the
middle left of the paper, a large area of uninterrupted green.

Severine tilted her head back in exhaustion
and asked, “Please, can we call it a day?” Her voice was heavy with
concern and fatigue. She’d had enough jungle for one day. It was
getting late and she could see Ben was tired too, his left eye
drooped when he started to fade. They were dehydrated and it was a
long slog back to the road.

“Almost,” Ben said, still looking at the
map.

“Well, while you decide, can I take a swim in
the pool?”

Ben glanced at the water behind them and back
at his wife. He wiped sweat from his brow.

“I’d prefer you didn’t. Who knows what’s in
there?” He stood from his crouch.

Severine dipped her fingertips into the
water. It was cool and inviting.

“How about just my feet?”

He grinned at her. “Ok, just your feet.”

She tugged at her brown bootlaces, which Ben
had tied in thick double knots.

“Just my feet.” She pulled off a sock and
dipped her toe and then her foot in the clear water, while Ben
watched. A bird-call in the distance got his attention and he
peered into the thick jungle beyond the shimmering pool.

“Hey, while you soak your toes, I’m gonna
take a look down there.” He gestured beyond the water’s far edge,
where a stream trickled in and the moss was greenest. The barest
hint of a path suggested something beyond.

“Oh, darling. Don’t.” She lowered her head
and looked up again, pleading. “Really. You can come back out here
another time without me. You’re tired. We’re both tired. Let’s just
rest for a moment and go back.”

Ben listened, thinking. He heard the bird
call again.

“Nah, it’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be back
in a flash, you won’t even notice I’m gone.” His face was filled
with light, his eyes bright with the unknown. As he dug through his
stuffed pack, Severine tried a different tack.

“You’re going to leave me alone, in this wild
place, while you go traipsing through the jungle?”

Ben looked back at her. “You know you’re
perfectly safe. You’ve got protection.” He pulled a pistol from his
pack, checked it was loaded, and placed it on the flat rock by the
water. “And you know how to use it. I’ll be ten minutes, out and
back.” He winked at her, then bent down to chuck her under her chin
and give her a quick kiss on the lips.

“That’s what you always say.” She grinned at
him, hiding her concern behind a brave smile. She didn’t want to be
a nagging wife. She consoled herself, this is what it’s like to be
married to an adventurer.

Ben leaned over and kissed her again. This
time he lingered, looking her in the eyes, tracing a finger from
her temple to her chin. Then he stood and stepped away. He picked
up his metal detector and walked around the pool onto the slight
path, leading each step with a sweep from the detector, the machete
slicing at the disgruntled underbrush.

“Call out if you need me.” He yelled back
over his shoulder.

“OK.” Severine dipped her feet into the pool.
She sat there for a few minutes, listening as the sound of Ben’s
steps grew distant, wiping sweat from her temple with the palm of
her hand. A small round stone sat by the water, its surface smooth
and gray. She picked it up, tossing it into the middle of the pond,
where it landed with a plunking sound, breaking the water’s
surface. Ripples in the blue water distorted the reflected
sunlight.

“Mosquitoes be damned,” she muttered, as she
pulled off her sweaty long-sleeve shirt, revealing a black jog bra
underneath. The cool air felt good on her bare arms. She stood and
stripped down to reveal black boy shorts and a bright green tattoo
of a small frog on her right hip. Tossing her clothes onto the rock
by the gun and smacking at a hungry mosquito that had landed on her
thigh, she waded into the pool, with an eye out for snakes.

The pool was ten feet across and four feet
deep in the center, the bottom covered with smooth round stones,
which felt good on Severine’s tired feet. She hunched down in the
deepest part, so that only her neck and head were showing. She
looked up at the patch of blue sky above her, framed by the tall
fronds of swaying trees.

She felt a rush of cold air on her neck and
turned in the water to face the direction it came from. It was just
a slight breeze picking up.

Impulsively, she called out, “Ben!!”

She waited. No reply. She called out again,
louder this time.

The explosion followed. She ran toward the
flames, though she could see the devastation ahead was complete. In
the light of the flames, she saw something glint on the ground and
crawled ahead toward it in the scorching heat. There on the ground
was the gnarled handle of a metal detector, bent from the
blast.

*******

Andrew listened, taking notes. Severine ended
her story, her eyes shining.

“How’d you get home?” Andrew thought it best
to keep moving forward.

“A biker picked me up on the road. An old
guy, American, gave me a ride to Sen Monorom on his Harley. Bikers
like the back roads after the rains, they tear it up, for fun. I
got the next helicopter back here.”

“You get this biker’s name?”

“No, I was…pretty incoherent. He’s just one
of those guys you see around town, in the POW-MIA shirts.” Andrew
had seen them, western men, remnants from another time, grizzled
and gray.

“Did you often go with Ben on his trips?”

“No. Just this once. He insisted I come, said
with everything going on, it wouldn’t last.”

“What’s ‘going on’?”

“Development. New buildings, factories,
businesses. Ben said it was going to change everything. We were
planning to leave next year, to go to Laos.”

She turned to the window, remembering. The
moon was high in the sky, shining its light on the broken golden
Buddha at Severine’s feet.

“We were planning to leave,” she
repeated.

Part 2

Chapter 10

The normally shallow river, turgid from rain,
had breached its banks and water flowed with greedy abandon over
the flat ground, flooding the grassland and underbrush that lined
the riverbank. It flowed underneath a sturdy thatched hut that
stood on wooden stilts near the river’s edge, on a slight rise
where the ground swelled up to meet the forest.

This river had shifted course this way and
that over the years, but its waters always found the way to the
South China Sea. The hut had seen many rainy seasons by this river,
its thick stilts withstanding the wilt and way of the rains. It
would weather many more.

Inside the hut’s thatched walls, a thin
Cambodian man sat alone, on a solid bamboo chair, his large hands
flat on the wood desk at the center of the room. A straw mat was
rolled up in the corner. The hut was dim with dusk.

The man stared straight ahead, unblinking,
waiting. His name was Mey Hakk. At this moment, he was plagued by
an excruciating migraine. He sat, unmoving.

The torment had fallen on Hakk quickly today.
He could always sense its onset, like a coming storm. His sight
grew pixelated, a shimmering in the corner of his eye, until his
entire field of vision undulated, colors and images mixing together
in a miasmatic mess. And then the agony would begin, shooting in
sharp arcs across his brain like a vengeful fever. If he tried to
fight it, it would only last longer. All he could do was wait.

This pain infuriated him. When it passed, he
would lash out at whoever was unlucky enough to be in his reach:
Sometimes it was a guard; more often a woman. More than once his
guards had disposed of a young woman’s body after one of Hakk’s
migraines.

A letter sat on the desk in front of him. It
was a few short paragraphs addressed to him and signed with a
flourish.

Hakk had read the letter several times since
he had received it a week ago by courier. Through the hazy pain,
Hakk stared at it, the words jumping off the page at him, the
brazen seal mocking him.

It didn’t matter anymore. Everything was in
place.

It was time. Time to begin.

*******

Hakk had been nine years old when the Khmer
Rouge soldier had handed him a machine gun and told him to guard
the rice fields. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge, in full control of
Cambodia, implemented its vision for independence from the outside
world, to abolish all aspects of government and commerce and to
force the Cambodian people onto collective farms, establishing a
single peasant class to work the land.

Hakk’s family, peasants from the coast, had
joined the forced migration. Hakk, with his mother, father, and two
older sisters, made the journey to a camp in the south with nothing
but the ragged clothes on their backs. There, they had lived in a
basic camp and worked the rice fields.

One day, an older Khmer Rouge guard took
notice of Hakk, who was tall for his age, and strong. They needed
young guards, children, not yet tainted in thought, who could be
trusted. The adults needed to work the fields, to be reformed.

Hakk found himself at age nine, his hands
heavy with the heft of the weapon, guarding dozens of adults. His
instructions were to shoot the runners.

For five unremarkable days, he had stood
guard over the rice harvest. With numb eyes, he’d watched the
workers in the golden fields, as they bent low, cutting small
bunches of the tall grass near the base of the stalks, tying these
together carefully not to loosen the rice, and stacking these for
threshing.

On the morning of the sixth day, Hakk saw a
worker, a man, maybe thirty years old, hunch low among the gold
stalks swaying in the breeze, watched him slither along the edge of
the field, the reeds moving in his wake. The worker headed toward
the forest’s edge, on the far side of the field, where he hoped, if
he could run fast enough, he could escape into the wilderness, to
hide and rest and find his way to freedom.

Hakk had watched with great interest as the
man slid among the stalks.

As the man had stepped up from the rice paddy
to the road, glancing backwards, always a mistake, Hakk had pulled
the trigger, blasting a hole in the man’s right shoulder.

Despite his wound, with the forest so close,
the man, a former schoolteacher, had continued running, his thin
arms flailing, his breath ragged with fear and determination.

Surprised at the runner’s persistence and
thrilled by the gun’s jolting action against his narrow bony
shoulder, Hakk had shot the gun again and again, until the man ran
no farther. Hakk walked forward and stared, entranced by the corpse
on the soft brown dirt.

That had been the most exciting day of Hakk’s
nine years.

For three more years he had guarded
prisoners.

When they tried to escape, he shot them.

It was simple work and he was good at it.

One hot March day in 1978, Hakk was called
away from his post by the fields. It was late afternoon and
temperatures had reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Several
workers had collapsed from heat exhaustion and Hakk had admonished
them.

As Hakk followed the older guard, a boy of
sixteen, he fretted that perhaps he had failed in some way. Hakk
considered his actions, how he held his weapon, how he disciplined
his prisoners, how he ignored their pleas for water, food,
mercy.

As they walked the road toward the forest’s
edge, the two boys, dressed in black, passed the workers bent low
in the rice paddies, their straw hats hiding stony faces. They
dared not look up at the men with guns walking by. They shuffled
through the mud with their baskets of seed.