THREE
MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU
HELENA MYANG was David Walker's aunt, not mine, but it didn't take long before I started to think of her as Aunt Helena, and once by accident I think I even called her "Aunt Helena."
She was everyone's favorite aunt, just hip enough with her kooky yellow sunglasses and hoop earrings and the way she cussed when she stubbed her toe—you wouldn't think an old lady would even know those words, much less an old missionary lady—that if you're a young Walker, you might think that maybe there is some hope in your genes after all. But Aunt Helena was also not so far off the family reservation that she didn't understand where you're coming from, having had the same experiences herself, when you complain that you're almost thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and bigger than your father and Dad still won't stop pointing at you in the middle of his preaching and saying that his boy there won't ever be big as him, that's how soon the end of the world is coming. Because Thomas did in the end grow into his Dad, believing the same things as old Raymond, chiefly that this weary world would soon be coming to an end, and using his father's tricks and tactics to convince the Dyalo to get right with God before the gates of Heaven were locked down; and David grew into his Dad, thinking that his father just didn't get it, the way the younger generation thought about things and that things here in this new country—Thailand, in David's case—just weren't like the way things were in the places where Dad had been young and at the top of his game. So David would complain to Aunt Helena, and Aunt Helena would listen to him patiently and lovingly, because he was her favorite nephew, and she'd tell him that one day, and it wouldn't be long, he'd be all grown up and he could go where he wanted and do as he liked, the important thing being to remember that his Dad loved him, a response which satisfied David precisely as much as that response has satisfied any frustrated adolescent anywhere.
Aunt Helena said that if I wanted to understand where David went when he went just where he liked, I should talk to a man named Rabbit, who lived in Boulder. Aunt Helena had his phone number in her little red phone book. He had gotten in touch with her after David's death, and the two of them had passed a tearful hour on the phone, remembering David. Rabbit was totally cool about my confusion with time zones— Rachel's grandmother wasn't the only one who found that an unusually tricky arithmetical operation—and thus my disturbing him at three in the morning: he said he was up anyway, dubbing mix tapes. I told him who I was and what I was working on. Then we got to talking about David.
Rabbit called him the Big Bamboo. "You ever see a picture of David? Long, tall, skinny, like a stalk of bamboo. It was Jerry who got the Bamboo's head right," Rabbit said. "Jerry just had an effect on him, you know? Of course, Jerry had an effect on all of us, but there was something special between the Big Bamboo and Jerry. Bamboo went on tour as messed up as any of us, and then Jerry just played six-string therapy out there, until the Bamboo felt like it was time to go back and do what he had to do. Man, I loved that guy. I can't believe he's dead."
I wasn't sure if Rabbit meant Jerry Garcia or David Walker, but I guess both were pretty tough blows.
Hot season, 1973, and Randy Cooper, whose father worked at the American embassy in Chiang Mai doing something that involved water buffalo, could not believe that David was such a dickwad that he had never ever seen a real movie in a real movie theater, indeed, had never seen a movie in his entire life.
"I told you," David said. He was twelve years old. "We used to live in the jungle. I mean, really in the jungle, where there wasn't even electricity and stuff. I had a pet tiger. I told you."
"Still a dickwad, Tarzan."
With Randy Cooper's explosive "dickwad," David realized that everything had changed. Since the family's arrival in Chiang Mai a little over two years earlier, David had been trading on the story of his adventures in the jungle, his account of the family's lonely homestead in the farthest reaches of northern Burma reaching a stirring crescendo with his account of his pet tiger. The story had produced big eyes in its first-grade recitals, and contemptuous "No ways" in the more skeptical sixth grade, until David produced for his classmates a photograph of himself with Elijah Cat in his lap. Aunt Helena showed me the photo: a bare-chested boy with a sweet goofy smile and an awful homemade haircut, sitting cross-legged on a bamboo floor with an honest-to-God tiger cub bent backward over his thigh. All four of the tiger's paws were in the air, and David was rubbing its belly. So it was all true after all. David had been enrolled in the fifth grade (at age level, to his grandmother's pride), when they came over from Eden Valley, and through the end of sixth grade, that photograph, explaining David's oddness and proving his extraordinary pedigree, had been the difference between dorkhood and grudging popularity.
But even the most wonderful story, told too often, loses the power to compel; and David's, which was his little part of the story the Walkers told of themselves, now provoked only withering glances of indifference from the other kids at school, who had heard the jungle stories when David didn't know how to play dodgeball; when he admitted that he had never heard of the Rolling Stones; when he couldn't ride a bicycle; and when he wasn't sure just who the president of the United States was— although David could have easily identified a dozen varieties of snake and pronounced them poisonous or benign, ably assisted in the construction of a thatch-and-bamboo home, identified all of the signs of the Rapture, or recited more lines of Scripture than anyone in school cared to hear, in both Dyalo and English. Indeed, by seventh grade David was no longer even the possessor of the most exotic story in class: Sarabeth Morgan's parents had been aid workers in Laos, and Sarabeth had grown up in a Hmong village, until the family was driven out by the war. She had seen a massacre, and had lost an adopted brother. She had arrived in Chiang Mai just this year, and her fresh stories made David's tales seem wilted and antique. David felt that it was time to put the photo of Elijah Cat back in the album and begin to accept that Eden Valley was gone forever, and that he lived now in Chiang Mai, where people went to the movies if they didn't want to be dickwads.
Not very long after his encounter with Randy Cooper, David decided to defy his father's unspoken but omnipresent code of personal conduct and go see the English-language movie of the week at the Kamtoey Theater, where was showing an entirely forgettable and now almost entirely forgotten blaxploitation film called Blacula, which the very same Randy Cooper, who brooded over the seventh grade like an incubus, the week before had said was so funny it almost made him piss himself.
Thomas had never specifically told his eldest son that he was not allowed to visit the Kamtoey Theater, but David knew his father was far too subtle a psychological tactician to prohibit outright a forbidden pleasure. Not long after the Walkers arrived in Chiang Mai, Linda-Lee had begun reading Cosmopolitan magazine, which she borrowed monthly from a classmate at school. Thomas didn't tell Linda-Lee that if she looked at that magazine one more time she'd be headed straight to the burning pits of Hell, which in Thomas's mind was not very far from the truth; but when he happened to notice a copy of Cosmo in Linda-Lee's book bag, the fifty-one-year-old Thomas began very publicly to read the magazine himself. Linda-Lee came home from school one day to find her father on the couch absorbed in an article about trimming the pubic regions, and at dinner with the whole family Thomas asked Linda-Lee if she had read that same fascinating article about how to seduce a man in six minutes or less? The funny thing was, Thomas continued, that was precisely how Mom had won his attention all those years ago, and was it working well for Linda-Lee? Linda-Lee went quiet as a puddle of water at the table. The very last thing the fifteen-year-old girl wanted to do was publicly compare her mother's quondam abilities as a seductress with her own. Can you imagine, Thomas went on, that people actually paid attention to this silliness when other people on this planet still lived as slaves? Norma went tsk-tsk wearily, and Grandpa Raymond shook his patriarchal gray head from side to side. You could almost hear the bags under his eyes go swish-swish in disappro
val. Linda-Lee wished that the ever-present gaping maw of Hell would swallow her up right then and there.
So to go the Kamtoey Theater, which if discovered would have subjected him to his father's mockery, David was forced to lie to his father, which if discovered would have subjected him to his wrath. In preparation for his first visit to the cinema, David announced to his mother that he had joined the swim club, which met from four to six on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. (Except at the height of the rainy season, when the pool, for reasons no one could explain, turned a violent cucumber green and widespread student opinion held that to dip so much as a toe in the water would lead to an agonizing death by slow-creeping gangrenous rot, which would pass upward from the feet, if you catch my horrifying drift, a terrible thing which really happened to some poor kid in the tenth grade. In the rainy season, David thought it prudent to play volleyball.) But attendance at athletic clubs was optional, and David explained to the swim teacher that he was expected that evening at a church youth group meeting.
Thus having fashioned himself a solitary afternoon in the hot season, David went to the Kamtoey Theater, by bicycle, directly and absolutely alone, first dodging traffic on the Charoen Muang Road, then over the Nawarat Bridge, crowded with bicycles, motorcycles, trishaws, tuk-tuks, and handcarts piled high with bags of rice and cement, past the aromatic flower market with its mountains of roses, orchids, jasmine, and lilies, then into the old city itself through the Tha Pae Gate. The whole way there, David swore to himself that he would never forget the Dyalo again, not even one time, not when the hills which ringed Chiang Mai were throbbing with demon-besotted Dyalo who needed his personal assistance, whose souls were crying out for liberation—although David did wonder just how two hours of swimming or volleyball, activities which no one disapproved of, would have helped the Dyalo. The question had bothered him enough that he'd asked his grandfather what he should be doing to help the Dyalo if he wasn't going out into the hills and preaching as his dad had done at his age. Grandpa Raymond had nodded in that slow, thoughtful way he had, and said that at the very least, David could pray for the Dyalo. "I take prayer extremely seriously, David. Prayer is often our most effective tool in the Fight." David was impressed by the serious, manly way his grandfather spoke to him, and decided that he could just as well pray for the Dyalo in a movie theater as in a swimming pool.
But the hard truth of the matter was that the very instant David settled himself nervously into the very last row of the Kamtoey Theater, he forgot his vows altogether.
David sat in the red-velvet seat, his heart racing and his skin prickling with a fine nervous sweat. He had a theoretical knowledge of film from his mother, who had told him that a film was like a photograph the size of a wall that moved, but the whole notion struck him as somewhat incredible. He wondered how he would describe the film to his classmates tomorrow. Maybe he would say, "It was so funny I peed myself," although he was not precisely sure how a moving photograph would be that funny, exactly; or he would say, "It was so scary I almost barfed," although again, the connection was obscure, between a picture which moved and the kind of cold terror he had felt when, pulling up the bucket from the well not long before the family left Eden Valley, he had found a cobra spitting back. That discovery had in fact provoked David to vomit.
The more David thought about barfing, the more he felt just a touch queasy. The Thai don't believe a movie should be a barrier to a decent meal and rightly consider popcorn proper fare only for pigs, so generations of cinemagoers had come into the theater laden down with meat-balls and grilled chicken on skewers, soaked with sweet sticky sauces; salted dried fish from the vendors lined up outside the theater; and bowls of noodles drenched in fish sauce, vinegar, sweet kaffir lime, spicy ginger, lemongrass, and galangal, the whole odoriferous concoction to be slurped down all through the show with the aid of chopsticks, whose click-clack against the ceramic bowls could be heard even at moments of highest cinematic tension. The red carpets and thinly upholstered seats had absorbed forty years of spills. The smell was overpowering, although to a nose not distended by guilt and anxiety, not entirely unpleasant. Later in life, David, wandering through the covered spice market or just passing by a street stall, would be instantly transported by a familiar smell back to the Kamtoey Theater and the sweet, illicit afternoons of his adolescence.
David thought about going home. His butt wasn't stapled to the seat. He figured that he had seen enough of the theater to fake it at school from now on, but not so much as to estrange him from his family. That was the hardest thing to explain to the other kids at school, just why he had never been to the movies. He had only recently begun to suspect that his family, in its enthusiasms and convictions, was different from other families; and, indeed, the Walkers lived more intensely in the service of the Lord now than they had even in Eden Valley, treating Chiang Mai as little more than a mirage offered up by the Deceiver to distract them from what they needed to do.
When they had first come to Chiang Mai and all of them were still living in a two-room house lent them by a wealthy Christian tailor, how admirably flexible in the face of adversity the Walkers proved themselves to be! Raymond and Laura were more than seventy years old, Thomas more than fifty, all of those children, not one Walker speaking a single word of Thai, little money, twenty years spent in the deepest jungle— and the only thing the Walkers knew for sure was that they would not forget the Dyalo!
"This was no accident, our coming here! Oh no! God's planning is coming together, and soon the Day will come. The wind of God had blown us down from China in the north," said Grandpa Raymond.* "And when the storm picks up, don't you worry, the Dyalo will come running in for Shelter. We'll be patient like a seed in the earth."
By giving those old enough to preach a goal, namely the conversion of the Dyalo of Thailand, Raymond distracted them all from the sorrows of exile. And all those old wild wandering Walker impulses, long suppressed in twenty years of jungle domesticity, came out again, to the exclusion of almost all other cares: Thomas, together with Uncle Samuel.
*The grandkids just loved Raymond but, nevertheless, when alone could not always resist the temptation of making fun of his many endearingly dramatic phrases: "the wind of God" blew across "the river of time"; men climbed "the tall mountain of sin," only to fall into "the deep abyss of suffering," in which was heard "the thunder of repentance"; the only deliverance from "the wolves of Satan" was "the sweet honey of Heaven"; "the black night of Eternity" was promised to all who had not been scared by "the fire of the Word," supported by "the solid oak that is His Promise," or touched by "the flames of His Love." Even Norma, when alone with the kids, could not resist laughing when her youngest son, Paul, did his imitation of Grandpa Raymond preaching.
Uncle Jesse, and Uncle Paul, devoted themselves to learning these strange new hills. Talk at the dinner table was of preaching and baptisms, conversions and wavering villages, shamans who fought the work and headmen who—Praise!—were coming close to the Light. The Dyalo in these hills were strange and different, their dialect outlandish, but the Walkers knew them. Even Raymond with his bad hip couldn't keep from going into hills and limping from village to village, as he hadn't done since he himself was a young man, and when the men came down from ten days, two weeks, a month in the mountains, caked in mud, their faces were flushed red because they had felt His power. David didn't even need to ask what his father would think of his decision to see Blacula. If you have time on your hands, son, pray for those folks in Mae Salop. That's what his dad would say.
David had almost convinced himself to leave the theater when the lights went down. He gripped the arm rails of his seat. The roller coaster rolling slowly upward, a plane in heavy turbulence, a doctor probing the genitals, that familiar tightening of the scrotum and cloaca. He wondered: Why had he bothered to lie to his mother? As if God couldn't see him sitting here? As if God couldn't afford a ticket to the movies, God who had made the universe? What had he been thinking?
Why, he wondered, had nobody told him that movies were in the dark?
Then bats. That was the first thing he heard. From up above, the hysterical shrieking of a flock of bats swooping down from above, a flock of idiot bats who nested in the rafters of the old theater. Confused by the unexpected and untimely alternations of light and dark, the bats flapped and dove, as strange lights began to play across the screen, accompanied by loud music, which David recognized from school assemblies as the Royal Anthem. On the screen, the bright colors coalesced into the form of a man, and then a crowd, then dissolved and disappeared just as quickly, before David could quite decide what he was seeing. Then David realized that it was just as his mother said: the screen was all one moving photograph. He saw the king of Thailand on the screen. In his anxiety David had hardly noticed the others in the audience, but now, looking around, he realized that he was the only one still sitting. He stood up.
David knew that when presented for the very first time with a photograph, many Dyalo, particularly the old people, have trouble interpreting it. It would only be colors and lines to them. They would hold it right up close to their eyes and then far away, then upside down or sideways, and would call their wives over, and say, "Do you see anything here?" and David would say, "Don't you see? That's a nose and that's eyes and that's a mouth there." And still the old Dyalo just wouldn't get it, until all of a sudden, like someone examining those optical-illusion puzzles which show either a candlestick or two faces, they'd say, "Ah-hah!" and they'd figure out what was going on—although each new photograph would still require long scrutiny before the "Ah-hah, isn't that clever!" moment.
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