Curse of the Pogo Stick dp-5

by Colin Cotterill

  “Well, he was right. About ten years ago, at the height of the bombing, a plane went down in that valley. It was before your people moved here to this mountain. It crashed into the gully just beyond the peak. The trees had fallen inward on top of it so it wasn’t visible from the air. That’s why the pilots and their cargo were never recovered. It was a transporter, not a fighter, so it was full of equipment. Chamee’s boyfriend discovered it while he was out foraging. It was stocked with canned food.”

  “That’s why she didn’t need the meals we made for her.”

  “They could have eaten for a year.”

  “It all makes sense.”

  “There was electrical equipment and medical supplies too. They had antiseptic and sterilized dressings and stitching thread. The boy had brought it all up to the house to prepare for the birth. It’s true he had no idea what to do with most of it. She was lucky. Even if she’d somehow survived the birth I don’t see how she could have raised two babies. She’s a baby herself.”

  “So…?”

  “I convinced her they would be better taken care of by the older women. She seemed relieved in a way. We took her down to the plane to recuperate. I believe the burden of being a mother might have been more than she could take. Without family support I couldn’t envisage the couple surviving with two babies. The boy was one heck of an electrician, though. He’d trained as an aircraft mechanic with the Americans. Some technician had taught him all he knew about electronics. The boy had it all set up there in the house. He’d run some wires from a generator to the trees above the path. He’d threaded a few dozen uninsulated wires down through the vines with the ends exposed. All he had to do was adjust the current with a rheostat to-You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Not a word. But I get the point. What about the voice? That was the boy?”

  “With a little help from an ampli-from a machine that makes sound louder. He’d whisper what he was about to say and she’d mime it.”

  Bao shook her head. “I can’t believe how deceitful she was. Even before the baby started to show, Chamee told her father of nightmares and demons, of visits to the Otherworld in her dreams. She planted the seeds in his head back then. Long wouldn’t have thought for a second that his good daughter had broken her promise to her parents not to go with a boy. He was so certain she was a virgin, the only possible explanation was that she’d been possessed.

  “He desperately wanted a shaman to come here to release her but traveling between villages was hard after the changeover. Her belly grew so fast and so big we were sure she’d burst if we didn’t get some help. Chamee moved up to the old cottage one night and all these signs started to prove she was really possessed. When I tried to go in and get her I got that same electric shock as you. We’d given up on her. That’s when the guides told us Yeh Ming was on the PL side and that you’d be passing through Xiang Khouang. It was like a miracle. Long had told us stories about you-about Yeh Ming-when we were little.”

  “I doubt whether-”

  They were interrupted by a very drunk Long, who fell in through the doorway like a felled fence post. He lay with his face on the earthen floor, laughing. Siri and Bao helped him to his feet.

  “Now what-as if I didn’t know-were you two up to in here all by yourselves?”

  “We weren’t…” Siri blushed.

  “Nah, don’t deny it. If I didn’t have three wives myself…” He laughed. “But there’s plenty of time for that old hanky-panky. You”-he grabbed Siri’s arm-”are our guest of honor. We need you.”

  He dragged Siri out into the moonlight with Bao tripping happily behind. They were halfway to the main house when it occurred to Long he should relieve himself. Despite the abundance of nature all around them, he walked unsteadily to the latrine, saying something about “order” and “discipline.” He instructed Siri to stay where he was. Bao joined him.

  “Last question before we get too drunk to care,” she said. “The house. Why did you order us to burn it?”

  “There was ammunition, flares, some kind of defoliant, and a few guns in there. The boy had carried them up from the plane in case they needed to defend themselves. From an entire army by the looks of it. If our rescue party ever makes it here and discovers you have a stash of American armory in your village, you’d be classified as rebels. They’d double the troops out after you and they’d have an excuse to shoot the lot of you on sight, irrespective of whether you were women or old folks. Goodness knows it’s going to be hard enough for you to get away without that.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Didn’t I tell you to pack that in?” Long shouted, returning from his business. He staggered into them and held onto their waists. “And what about your weak-minded assistant?” he asked. “Do you think we should invite him along to our party too?”

  “Ooh, I don’t think he’ll be awake until at least tomorrow,” Bao told him with a slightly guilty look on her face.

  “Now what have you done to him?” Siri asked, not really caring.

  “You remember when we first met?”

  “The sleeping poison?”

  “It was for his own safety. It seems whenever he’s conscious he gets himself into trouble.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Siri laughed.

  They strode into the main house. Candles and lamps burned everywhere, giving the building a warm and jolly feeling it hadn’t known since Yeh Ming’s arrival. Dia played the geng with so much love the music seemed to throw its arms around the newcomers when they entered. Phia and Ber danced to some entirely different music only the two of them could hear. Despite the comparative youth of the evening, Chia had already collapsed in front of the family altar like an offering and was snoring contentedly. As was her way, she would wake refreshed in a few minutes and start all over again. Zhong’s reincarnated father lay on his back cycling his legs through the air.

  New senior wife Nhia collected her husband at the door and steered him to his place at the feast. The village’s entire stock of rice whisky filled a twenty-gallon drum. They wouldn’t be taking it with them so they had no choice but to finish it tonight. There was more roast pork than a man could get through in a lifetime and the vegetable garden had been pillaged. Only the house spirits were down. They moped in the beams and rafters like spoiled children. They knew this was their last night of life after death. Like the Hmong they protected, they had nowhere to go.

  A Moment Frozen in Cotton

  Siri awoke with the type of head a man who drinks half a barrel of rough rice liquor deserves. His mouth was as dry as the average skeleton’s eye socket. He tried to swallow and his windpipe constricted the way an empty balloon might if you sucked instead of blew. His old heart quivered and his bladder felt solid as a bowling ball. If ever Laos were to establish a temperance league he felt sure he could be its poster boy. He rolled painfully onto his back. Something was missing from the collage of life around him. The sun was sawing through the loose thatch, which meant the morning mist had already burned off and he’d overslept. That led him to the conclusion that he’d probably reneged on his promise to help with the morning chores.

  He eased his neck against the crick and once more reached to scratch the absent earlobe. That’s when he noticed the cloth beside him on the platform. It was the most beautifully embroidered pa n’tow he had ever seen. He held it up in front of his face. It was a handcrafted picture on blue/gray cloth no more than eighteen inches square but months of work had gone into its sewing. He held it to his nose and could smell the familiar natural scent of its maker. Bao hadn’t struck him as the embroidering type but he knew the skill would have been passed down from her grandmother and mother when she was a little girl. She had learned her lesson beautifully.

  He studied the frieze, a photographic moment from the village. There were the houses, the ponies, and the livestock. The spring pond lay in white lines on the hill and wild animals came to drink from it. W
omen milled around the village in their fine costumes, one swollen with child. Young folk played and men worked. Elder Long and his departed wife, Zhong, stood proudly at its center holding hands. And, almost as an afterthought, a cloud floated across the sky and on it sat an old man with green eyes and white hair. Above his head, a ring of yellow thread made a halo.

  Siri lay back and smiled at his gift, he traced the raised cotton of Bao’s needlecraft, and he fancied he smelled her there too on his pillow. Only then did it occur to him what was missing from the village-sound. An unexplained anxiety fell over him. He looked toward the shaman’s altar. The pogo stick and all its trappings were gone. He forgot his aches and pains and made for the door. Once his eyes were accustomed to the bright sunlight he was able to look about him at the empty village. There were no animals. The chicken coup and stable were empty. No surviving pigs, no goats, no reincarnated dogs. And no people.

  He hurried across the compound to the main house and stood in the doorway. The room partitions were disassembled and the dirt floor had been excavated here and there: one hole beneath the central beam where once the placentas of all newborns were buried, others around the rim where valuables had probably been hidden to keep them safe from marauders during the unattended days. The silver jewelry and ornaments he’d seen little sign of since his arrival had gone with their owners. With the whisky still buzzing in their heads, the Hmong had packed their valuables and their opium nuggets and their salted pig meat and they’d left. And Siri had slept through it all. His chest felt empty as if some important organ had been removed from it. He held the pa n ‘tow to his nose and breathed in the strength and youth of his General Bao and the courage of her tribe.

  If he hadn’t been so dehydrated, he might have even managed a tear or two. Something about the countryside released the emotions that remained bottled in the city. Perhaps he wasn’t just sad for the plight of these friends, perhaps it was a global, all-encompassing sadness that included his whole country, and the hopelessness of life, and the fact that there would never really be peace in the world because man was intrinsically stupid. At that moment, with the mother of all hangovers pounding in his head, he felt he shouldered the misery of every victim in the universe.

  He gulped down several mouthfuls of water from the communal urn and carried a bowl to the hut of weak-minded Assistant Haeng. The judge had that soggy gray look of someone who’d slept too long. Siri dribbled water into his mouth and watched him swallow in his sleep. He folded the judge’s indigo hands across his chest so he looked like a gloved body in a coffin.

  “Rest in peace,” he said, and left the judge to collect more dreams that might absorb and overwhelm his confusing reality of the past few days.

  Siri made his way up the hill, passed the charred and still smoking remains of the haunted house, and carried on over the crest and down the hidden trail they’d walked the day before. The feeling of unrest was particularly strong here but at least he now knew what malevolent spirits he was dealing with. It was a steep drop to the valley but Siri had lived in mountains for a large chunk of his life. He negotiated the rocky trail like a goat. It wasn’t long before he reached the transporter, almost completely shrouded in jungle.

  “Don’t worry,” Siri called. “It’s me, Yeh Ming. I’m alone.”

  The boy appeared behind him on the narrow trail with a fearsome-looking submachine gun.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said, like a high-school student addressing his teacher.

  “How’s my patient?”

  “She’s very fine, sir. Very fine.”

  He led Siri to the back of the plane where Chamee lay on a bunched-up parachute. She was a far better color than she’d been the day before. He checked the pulse and temperature of the little mother and asked permission to look at the incision. She nodded and talked to the roof of the plane while he checked his handiwork.

  “Bao came,” she said.

  “What?” He stopped.

  “Bao, she came to see me early this morning.”

  “Really? How on earth did she find you?”

  “You told her we were here.”

  “Even so, it isn’t the easiest trail to pick up, especially before light.”

  “Our Bao is special.”

  “Yes, I think she is. And?”

  He was pleased with the wound and began to change the dressing.

  “She was kind. She pretended to be mad at first. But then she said she understood what we did. She knew people would be disgusted with us and it was better for the boys if they were raised by the others. But she didn’t want us to disappear. She said if I had a problem I should try to contact her through our clan.”

  “That was good of her.”

  “Yes, she’s given me hope. She gave me a message for you too.”

  Siri tried to hang on to his professional demeanor. “Oh?”

  “She said you and your assistant should stay where you are and that you’ll be rescued soon.”

  “Oh, I see. How could she be so sure of that?”

  “The geng.”

  “Of course.”

  Siri had changed the dressing and was confident there would be no problem. She was a hardy young thing and would live to be a hundred, he told her.

  “And she said for me to tell you…” She smiled at her boy husband. “That she’s sorry she couldn’t marry you yet but she has to guide her people to safety. She’ll come back to you after they’ve found a new home.”

  “What a silly thing to say,” Siri blushed.

  “She loves you, Yeh Ming.”

  Siri busied himself with bandages and lint.

  “And, of course, I’m very fond of her. In a sort of great-grandfatherly kind of way.” He was annoyed that he’d felt it necessary to categorize his love. The young soldier contributed to the emotion of the moment without the slightest embarrassment.

  “And we love you too, sir. Me and Chamee. If you weren’t here my woman would be dead by now. We’ll always remember you and say prayers to you at the ceremony of the ancestors.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly dead yet but, of course, it was my pleasure,” Siri said. He’d topped himself up with water in the village so his eyes watered nicely at the sight of this pretty pair in front of him. “And perhaps I could ask you a favor.”

  “Anything,” the boy said.

  “The fliers. The men who were in this plane when it went down.”

  “They were American pilots, sir. I buried their remains. I gave them a decent send off.”

  “A Hmong funeral?”

  “Just a little one, sir. As best as I could remember it.”

  “That was very good of you. But their souls aren’t content where they are. They want to go home.”

  The boy nodded and Chamee squeezed his hand.

  “I can understand that. We’ve felt something here.”

  “I need to find their families.”

  “They didn’t have dog tags, sir. The American fliers at

  Long Chen weren’t encouraged to wear them because they weren’t supposed to be here.”

  “Never mind, son.” Siri nodded. “We have the number of the plane. It shouldn’t be that hard to identify them. Where are they?”

  Siri walked forlornly down the hill to the village with the remains of Daniel (Danny) San Souci and Eric Stone wrapped in a strip of tarpaulin. Their names were on personal letters they’d carried with them, probably against regulations. But the men who fought the secret war were tough, experienced pilots who lived every day as if it were the last because, for many of them, it was. These two had probably outweighed Siri by a few hundred pounds when they were alive, but now he carried them both under one arm. They were the reason why the Otherworld had been set in a Western city on Siri’s journey. The spirits of Danny and Eric had erected the scenery. It was they, not Chamee, who had coaxed Siri to the beyond. Theirs were the souls that needed rescuing from limbo, not hers. It wasn’t clear how the green button had made it into the rock pool,
but it had obviously belonged to one of the pilots. When they saw it, the spirits could sense how close Siri had come to finding their remains. It had given them hope. It was his duty now to put them to rest.

  The village was laid out before him, lifeless and without soul. Lumps of disused buildings perched on a hillside. Then something moved by the main house. At first he thought it might be Judge Haeng out looking for some new way to do away with himself, but as he got closer he could see a pony tethered there. A Hmong girl sat on the outside bench. He quickened his pace, but when he rounded the house he saw Dia skimming her sandaled feet over the dust.

  “Dia, what’s wrong?”

  “Hello, Yeh Ming. Nothing big,” she said. “I’m the fastest rider so they sent me back to let you know what we decided. I have to catch up with them.”

  He sat on the bench beside her.

  “What happened?”

  “We met another group. They were on their way to join the big march too. They told Elder Long about relatives of theirs who’d gone before. They’d traveled at night to avoid PL patrols and the Vietnamese troops. They said a lot of the PL soldiers still hate us from the war and they kill our people on sight. No arrest, just bang bang. They had to be very quiet so they wouldn’t be spotted. In the daytime the Hmong could sleep somewhere hidden away, but…”

  She looked at the distance and tried to steady her voice.

  “But what?”

  “But often the group’s location was given away by little children. A baby would cry and the PL would find the group and kill all of them. Some groups were so afraid they abandoned mothers and infants or they accidentally suffocated the babies trying to keep them quiet.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “So, Elder Long thought…” She looked sheepish.

  “Where are they?”

  She smiled and pointed to the shaman’s hut.

  “Elder Long says it will just be until we get to Thailand. He says for you to give me an address and he’ll contact you and we can find a way to get them over the river. He said you’d know a way because you’re Yeh Ming.”