Three Flames
Page 10
With the bike business going well and no family duties except to pasture the family cow, Pich had time on his hands. He washed his new bike every afternoon, dirty or not. Sometimes, he met people to play cards. He usually lost at cards, but no matter. He had good money coming in. When he wasn’t playing cards, he hung around the market. He would stroll past the bright red rambutans, the green morning glory, the squawking chickens with their feet tied together, and he’d steal a few items here and there, to keep in practice. He never stole anything from his cousin Bona’s gasoline stall. One of the girls who worked in the fish stall started giving him the look and talking to him when he passed by. He liked her hair and her ass. On Wednesday afternoons, he took her out to Khean’s fields. She always wanted to talk, but he just wanted her to shut up while he got on top of her.
Pich was also thinking of dropping out of school. The school was a long yellow building with a red tiled roof and three classrooms made of concrete walls and concrete floors. No one had the money to maintain it, and the walls had holes as big as fists. Furthermore, all the shade trees had been cut down for firewood. Inside the school, it was unbearably hot. Pich would doze off, half listening to the teacher read from a French grammar, and wake up in a pool of sweat. School was a waste of time. School didn’t help get a job. Nobody got a job, except for the farmers and sellers. And they were all poor. With the bike business, he had a good thing going.
He was thinking that finally his luck had changed. He deserved some good luck. So far, he’d had only bad. For one thing, he didn’t look anything like his parents, and that was definitely bad luck, or maybe something worse. His brother, Chann, had the mouth of their mother and the chin of their father. Their sister, who died of malaria when she was three, looked exactly like their mother. But Pich didn’t look like any of them. His parents used to joke that they didn’t know where he came from. They would say it like maybe he was somebody else’s child, or maybe not even Khmer. When his sister died, they made him stand inside a circle marked with chalked drawings of crosses and skulls. When he was thirteen, he ran away from home. But an uncle found him in Praek Khmau and slapped him so hard he fell to the ground, then brought him back to his family in Praek Banan.
Now he was showing them. Some mornings, he would leave a five-hundred-riel note lying on his sleeping mat just so his parents would see it. His father wouldn’t say anything, but Pich knew that he noticed. Chann noticed too. Pich saw how his brother looked at his new bike. Chann’s ten-year-old one-speed was always breaking down with a loose chain or a flat tire or something.
“What did you pay for it?” asked Chann.
“Enough,” said Pich.
“You should have bought a Japanese.”
“This one goes fifty on the national road.”
“Really. You ever ride it that fast?”
“Yeah.”
Chann nodded. “I like the color.”
“The shop in Praek Khmau had them in gold and in red,” said Pich.
“I like the red, the one you got,” said Chann. “That’s a lot of money you’re riding. Stolen money.”
“Money is money.”
“I work for my money.”
Pich was thinking to himself how much work could Chann do, blind in one eye, but he let it go.
After a year in the bike business, the boys were making as much money in a month as their parents made in half a year and were talking about extravagant plans for the future. Except that they had to hide in the shed in Khean’s fields every few weeks, when Lon Nol’s army came to the village in the middle of the night waving guns and looking for new recruits. Keep their heads down, Vann said, and they’d be all right and the war would be over and they’d all be rich.
With things going well, Vann decided to have a small celebration. He also decided that the celebration would be at Pich’s house. Pich explained that his father was not a friendly man and definitely not enthusiastic about parties in his house. But Vann insisted. He said he would bring along enough palm wine to make everybody happy. A gift from him, he said. Vann had a way of talking so that you knew you should do what he said.
The party started around seven in the evening, when the fields were just turning purple and dissolving into the night. All along the main dirt road, you could hear the women and girls singing while they scrubbed dishes and tossed the dirty water out the windows. Some of the boys had already been drinking and could barely climb up the rickety ladder into Pich’s house. It was a one-room house with two chairs and a table, illuminated by a kerosene lamp. In a corner sat a ten-kilo bag of rice and several sleeping mats.
Right away, Pich’s mother, Layheng, drank two cups of palm wine, one after the other. Then she sat in one of the chairs, dazed. “I’ll go with you to Naron’s shop tomorrow,” she said to Chann, trying to whisper.
“You don’t need to, Mae,” said Chann. “I’m just picking up hinges.”
“I want to,” said Layheng. “I’ll keep you company.” She patted Chann on his cheek.
“Tomorrow’s wash day,” said Pich’s father.
“I know,” said Layheng. “I can do the wash in the afternoon.”
“I doubt that,” said Pich’s father. He winked at the boys. Then he turned to Chann. “You’re right. You don’t need your mother to go with you to Naron’s shop tomorrow.”
Layheng got up from her chair and went behind the hanging sheet that marked off the sleeping area.
After that, it was just the guys. The room was boiling hot, and everyone was sweating pretty heavily. Pich’s father sprawled in one of the chairs without his shirt and poured himself a cup of palm wine. The boys were all sitting on the floor, passing around a bottle and listening to a song on the radio. Dara found a spot next to Pich, not too close but not too far away either.
“This music is crap,” said Vann. “Let’s play cards.” He handed the deck of cards to Chann, on his blind side, and the cards fell on the floor. Chann started picking them up.
“You boys are going to get your butts caught,” said Chann. He squinted at Pich with his good eye and took a large gulp of palm wine.
“We’re professionals,” said Vann.
“That’s right,” said Pich. “We’re professionals. And you don’t know shit about anything except shoveling shit.” That brought a laugh from the gang.
“Chann’s a good farmer,” said Pich’s father. “He’ll take care of his family.” In fact, Chann was engaged to marry Phalla, one of the most beautiful girls in the village, prized for her delicate features. Everything had been arranged. For some reason Pich couldn’t fathom, girls were always falling in love with Chann. Some way he had of talking to girls.
Maybe they felt sorry for him. Pich looked over at his older brother. He felt like taking a couple thousand riel out of his pocket right then and laying it on the table. He fingered the bills.
The boys began talking about the war and when it would end. Some of their friends had been forced to join Lon Nol’s troops and go north to fight the Vietnamese. Last week, they’d seen a hundred troops on the national road. One of the boys heard on the radio that a bomb had fallen on Kol Phan and destroyed half the village. It was an army called the Khmer Rouge that launched the bomb, not the Vietnamese. Some monks were murdered after that.
Pich was half listening, mixing his palm wine with some beer he’d gotten from a bar in Praek Khmau. Although he was small and skinny, he could hold a lot of liquor. And he had experience. When he knew he was almost drunk, he ate some rice to dilute the alcohol in his body. He didn’t want to puke in front of the group. Later, he was planning on showing them his pistol, which a cousin had taken from a dead soldier and given Pich for a present. He’d practiced shooting it at tin cans in the fields.
Pich’s father went down the ladder to take a piss. He’d already helped himself to an entire bottle of palm wine. As soon as he was gone, Vann started in about his two girlfriends, Ratha and Maline. Maline’s tits were so big, he said, that he thought they were fake,
until he saw her naked. Even then, he had to put his hands all over her to make sure. She asked him to put his hands on her, he said. It was true love. Vann was leaning against the sack of rice, his face red from the alcohol. Ratha had small tits, he said, but her nipples were nice, like the buds of lychee flowers. Just last night, she’d given him a love bite on his shoulder. He took off his shirt to show everyone. They were in the middle of doing it, he said, and she just couldn’t control herself. He lifted the kerosene lamp off the table and held it up to his shoulder, so the other boys could see the love bite. It was a red splotch, about the size of a small mango. It really hurt when she bit him, he said, but it was the kind of hurt that he liked. Vann bragged a lot. Pich suspected that sometimes he made things up. Vann took another long swig of the palm wine. Half the wine dribbled out of his mouth and trickled down his bare, skinny chest.
“Dara, what do you think of all that?” said Pich. “What Vann’s talking about.” Pich’s head was beginning to hurt.
“I don’t think anything about it,” said Dara, slurring his words.
“You ever seen a girl’s tits?” said Pich. Dara didn’t say anything. He just took another drink of palm wine.
“I bet you’ve seen plenty of cocks,” said Pich. That brought another round of laughter.
Dara crawled over to a corner of the room and began puking. His puke dripped between the bamboo strips of the floor and landed on the ox below.
Pich’s father came back into the house. “It’s time to go,” he said. He looked over at Vann. “It’s time for you gangsters to leave.”
“They’ll go,” said Pich.
“What friends you’ve got,” Pich’s father said, slurring his words. “Fucking idiots.”
“OK, OK,” said Vann, “I’m gone.” Vann made a monkey face to Pich and finished the wine in his cup. Then, without bothering to clean up the empty bottles and spilled palm wine and scattered mango pits, he stumbled down the ladder into the night. The other boys followed. Pich looked out the window and could see their dark silhouettes, pissing on the dirt road beside his house.
About a week after the party, the ghost of Pich’s grandmother Pha appeared on the west hill. It was late afternoon, and Pich was bringing home the family cow when he met her. Yeay Pha looked exactly as she had in life, except now she didn’t have any teeth, so that when she opened her mouth it appeared like a dark hole in her head. And she was much thinner. Slung around her neck was a ratty krama. Meeting ghosts at any time of the year other than Pchum Ben was usually bad luck.
“Yeay?” was all Pich could say. Grandmother? He came to a halt. His cow continued meandering down the hill.
“Yes, yes,” Pha said, and coughed. “Grandson.” She walked around him, eyeing him with concern, then sat on a flat rock. “You don’t look good, Grandson. You’re looking scrawny.” Her voice sounded funny with the teeth gone.
Pich shrugged his shoulders. He was afraid to say much. Ghosts appeared for a reason. Had he insulted his yeay? He began thinking about the corner in their house where they kept photographs of her and Grandfather Sieng and the weekly ancestor prayers they hurried through before dinner.
Pha sat very still, as if she were meditating, except every now and then she swatted at a mosquito. She was planning on saying something to him, he could tell. Maybe she was waiting a while for dramatic effect. In his mind, Pich could see her sitting on the floor of the cooking area in their house, her usual spot, her bony legs crossed one over the other with the crusty white warts on both feet, mercilessly plucking the feathers off a chicken while complaining about how painful it was for her to walk nowadays, and how Pich’s mother had never learned how to cook. Sometimes Pha would grumble about the sexy photo of Dy Saveth that Pich’s father had tacked to the wall, until one day she snatched the poster down and threw it into the river. A man shouldn’t be gawking at two females in the same house, she said. At night, after dinner, Pha would go behind the dangling sheet where she slept and have Pich’s mother massage her back for a half hour with coconut oil. Everyone could hear her moaning with pleasure. Then she would tell a fairy tale to Pich and Chann and kiss them good night. Two years ago, she’d passed away in her sleep, with a grin on her face.
“How old are you now, Grandson?” said Pha.
“Seventeen.”
“Time passes quickly for the dead. Bad days we’re in now. Everybody killing everybody.” She looked at him. “You should eat more.” Pha stuck out her bare feet. The warts were still there. “But you’re making money. Your father should have moved to Siem Reap a long time ago when I told him. Cousin Manith had a rich silk business there. Your father wouldn’t listen. Farming is for the stupid people. Our family goes back to kings. Did you know that? We were royalty.”
Pich had always gotten on with Yeay Pha. They used to sit together underneath a particular acacia tree behind the market while his mother was shopping. This was the first time he’d heard that his family came from royalty. Maybe his grandmother was just making that up. She did look a little crazy. For a moment, Pich’s eyes wandered down the hill. The cow was long gone. His father and brother would yell at him for sure.
“I don’t get enough to eat, Grandson. I’m hungry, very, very hungry.”
“I’m sorry for you, Yeay.”
“Every day, I just walk around in circles. Ten thousand laps a day. I walk every day in circles. And I get nothing to eat. You’re the prosperous member of the family. I have a job for you. Yes.” Then, in a tired voice, Pha recited a grocery list: Two bowls of rice. One rambutan. One bag of water spinach. Two mangoes. Half a boiled chicken. “Every Wednesday afternoon before sundown,” she said. “Here. On this hill.”
Pich repeated the items. The chicken might be hard to come by on a regular basis.
“Do you understand?” said the old woman. “Every Wednesday. Don’t disappoint me. You’re the one I trust.” She swatted at a mosquito.
Pich felt honored that Pha trusted him. She could have come to his father or mother or Chann. But he was not happy with this assignment. Wednesday afternoons, he had other business. And he was afraid that he might bungle the job. Bad things happened to people who disappointed the dead.
That night, he told his parents about meeting Pha on the west hill. His father and Chann were packing up bags of rice seed. Planting season was only a few days away.
“I don’t want that woman in this house again, dead or alive,” said Pich’s mother.
“You can demand anything,” said Pich’s father, “but ghosts go where they want.”
“I heard a rustling last night,” said Pich’s mother. “It was Pha. I’m sure of it. She was coming to steal my new sarong from Phnom Penh.”
“Grandmother was missing some teeth,” said Pich.
“You do exactly what Yeay Pha says,” Pich’s father said to him.
“Ghosts can get angry,” said Chann, “and do evil things.”
Sure enough, two weeks later, Pich forgot to include the rambutan in the groceries he left on the hill. That night, the ox below their house was mysteriously freed from its tether, and it took Pich and his father half a day to recover the animal. Another week, Pich provided only one mango in the week’s delivery, and the next morning they found a crushed dog at the top of the ladder right in front of their door. He knew that his parents blamed him. Every Tuesday, he started to get anxious, thinking he would forget something again.
“This job shouldn’t be left to you,” Pich’s father said to him. They were sitting at a table at Phirum’s filthy restaurant, underneath a fading poster of the great temples of Angkor Wat.
“But Yeay Pha came to me,” said Pich. “She chose me.”
“I’ll go with him to make sure,” said Chann with a smirk. Pich’s father nodded.
“She chose me,” said Pich again. He got up from the table, shoving Chann’s chair as he did so.
“Yeay Pha must be getting fat,” said Chann one afternoon after they’d left the groceries on the west hill.
“Mae wants me to,” said Chann. “Father does too.”
“You should have your own house,” said Pich.
Chann nodded. “Maybe you can pay for it.”
Several months after the celebration at Pich’s house, the bike business started to slack off. They had a good inventory of stolen bikes, but nobody was buying them. Vann and Pich discussed the situation one afternoon at a bar in Praek Khmau called the Banana Leaf. It was a place frequented mostly by middle-aged men who wanted to get drunk and spend a few hours with pretty females. There were always a few young girls at the counter, showing a lot of flesh and big smiles. One or two of them would sit next to each group of customers and drink and eat with them and pretend that they were about to walk out with them and screw all night. Sometimes they did.
It had started to rain. The drops pinged on the tin roof. “Fuck it,” said Vann, putting down his glass of rice wine. “I don’t know what’s happened. Everything was going nice. In another year, I could have set myself up in Phnom Penh.”
“Maybe everybody’s scared, with soldiers all over the place,” said Pich. He took a long drink from his glass and fondled the girl sitting next to him. She put her hand on his thigh. Vann ordered another bottle of rice wine and some prahok. They’d already drank a half dozen glasses between them and eaten two plates of tamarind fruit.