Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski

  Then a young man with long hair and sideburns in the front seat of a pickup truck called out, "Hey, Miracle! I got a ticket for you."

  David walked over to the truck. "You're not going?"

  "Nah, she's sick. We gotta go." He pointed to a young woman shivering in the front seat of the pickup truck, her arms tightly crossed in front of her chest.

  The woman groaned menacingly, and the man turned in her direction. "Listen, you're not goin' to ralph, right?" he said. "My brother just got this fucker deep-cleaned—upholstery, carpets, everything."

  David felt a sudden sympathy for the woman. "You want to wait a little while, see if she gets better?"

  "Nah, we gotta go," the man said. "It's gonna be a frickin' great show too. I just know it too. I always know. We drove all the way down from Portland, and—"

  He waved his hand in a what-can-you-do gesture, handed David the ticket, and drove off. David shouted thanks in the direction of the retreating vehicle, and then thanked God.

  The Lord, David would later tell his listeners, the Lord works in the strangest ways. But that is surely the essential point, he would say: He works!

  By the time David had wandered back the length of the Lot, the Dead had taken the stage.

  The guy in the parking lot was right, David told his audiences: It was a great show, proving once again the wisdom of the old Deadheads, who said that you needed to go to every show to see a good show, and you needed to see every good show in order to see a great show. The day was so hot that Bob started spraying the crowd down with water from the stage—and in the audience, someone thinks: Those are little drops of Bob himself, floating out of that rubber hose, little refreshing drops of Bob himself.

  It was somewhere in the second set, just after "Uncle John's Band," when the miracle happened, and what could it be called but a miracle? David heard the angels singing. He was lying on his back in the grass, his long arms at his side, a damp towel across his eyes, his fingers dug into the earth, his mind wandering, when Jerry introduced a familiar melodic line into the musical chaos for the which the Grateful Dead are known. Jerry was playing something that David recognized from his childhood— and how did Jerry know that tune? But Jerry knew so many tunes, country and folk, the blues, Spanish canciones, even an occasional Scottish hymn. Jerry played out that melody a little more, playing so sweetly that it could have been Grandma Laura singing as she bathed David in the running waters of Eden River when he was four years old. David sat up straight and listened more intently.

  Then the angelic chorus began to sing in four-part harmony:

  There were ninety-and-nine that safely lay

  In the Shelter of the fold.

  But one was out on the hills far away,

  Far off from the gates of gold.

  Away on the mountains wild and bare,

  Away from the tender Shepherd's care,

  Away from the tender Shepherd's care.

  The angels mingled their majestic voices with Jerry's reedy tenor, and David began to cry. David felt his soul separate from his body and he knew that he had died and was being welcomed into Heaven. Now he had come Home. He thought of his grandfather wandering through Chinese villages, desperate to tell the people what he knew. David could feel his soul floating vaguely over Oregon, and from his perch in Heaven where the angels sing, David could see the white shore of the dark Pacific, and then huge waters and stormy seas, then a line in the ocean where it was night, and far in the distance, across the ocean and high in the hills, David could see Dyalo villages in darkness.

  In the story the Walkers told of themselves, this was the miracle that brought David back home.

  The creature that got off the plane a week later, although definitely David, was not at all the person Norma had expected.

  She had not expected that her sullen, good-natured, shy, slouching, adolescent son, a boy capable of spending whole days on the couch watching the goldfish, would be transformed into the young man who exploded off the plane. There was no other way to put it. Right there at the arrivals counter of the Chiang Mai airport, David picked up his Grandma Laura, all eighty-odd years of her, right off her feet. Norma knew that Thomas had been nervous about how to greet his own son; but David overwhelmed the anxieties by enfolding his father in his long arms—my, Thomas looked little next to David; he must have grown, and that long hair and beard only made him look bigger—hugging him with such ferocious intensity that when finally the two untangled themselves, Norma noticed that her husband's light green eyes were damp. David winked at his mother over Thomas's shoulder. She really hadn't expected all that hair.

  Norma was so glad he was home. But everything about him was different. He walked differently: the last time Norma saw David, he used to shuffle. Norma could not count the number of times that she had said, "David, pick up your feet. David, don't walk like a turtle. David, stand up straight." Now David strode through the airport terminal out into the hot Chiang Mai sun, spreading his long arms like the wings of a huge bird. Then they got to the house, and David strode inside, his long arms sweeping back and forth in huge arcs. Only when David had entered the house, in the process hugging, kissing, and embracing no fewer than twenty aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, and cousins, not to mention a goodly portion of Chiang Mai's Christian community, sometimes taking two or three relatives into his long arms at the same time; only when he had flopped himself down in his old place on the couch and asked if there was anything to eat in the house, did Norma really recognize her son.

  A few days after his return, the Walkers had a party for David. A party in the Walker way of thinking was simply normal life plus a cake, and it was Norma who baked the cake that night and made the frosting. After the guests had gone home, David told his family about the miracle that brought him home, about the moment when he had heard the angelic chorus singing.

  When David said that he was sure that he had died, Norma shivered. Am I the only one here who thinks this is weird? she thought. She had heard Raymond's story ten thousand times; but that was Raymond, and long ago, and in the war. But to hear the story from David's own mouth, to hear David—David!—who had always understood her so well, so much better than anyone else, speak of rising up into Heaven and hearing angels singing hymns, for just a moment Norma felt lonely, lonely and more than a little frightened, looking around that room and wondering just who these people were that were her family.

  The next morning, when Norma woke up, David was already gone. He left a note. "Great to be home. Back soon. Love you all & bless. David."

  He wasn't home again for almost a month, no phone calls, nothing.

  David came back suntanned and a little bedraggled, his sweaty hair showing the first hints of dreadlocks. Norma was determined not to show how bothered she had been by his absence.

  "Oh, honey, I'll put a plate on the table for you," she said. "Lunch will be ready in a jiffy."

  "Thanks, Mom. I could eat a horse." David had an odd grin on his face, and was whistling tunelessly. He was an enthusiastic but incompetent whistler.

  Norma went about rearranging the plates on the table to make space for David. There was a plate for Laura, who hardly ate anymore, then Raymond, then Thomas, then a place for herself, near the kitchen, then David's little brother Paul, who ate enough for a small army, then a plate for David's big sister Ruth-Marie, who was pregnant again, and then a plate for David, slouched against the doorway. He really needed some new clothes; those things on his back were almost rags.

  "Honey, do you want to take a shower before lunch?" Norma asked.

  "Are you saying I smell?"

  "Nothing a little lye wouldn't fix."

  "I bathed in the village this morning," David said.

  "Next time try using soap and water."

  David still had the same grin on his face. Norma finally had enough. "Honey, just a word saying where you're going and when you're coming back, that's all I ask. I worry."

  But David hardly heard her. He was still gr
inning, that same odd grin. "Mom, do you remember Moo Bat Yai? With Headman Honey?"

  "Of course I remember Moo Bat Yai. Headman Honey is up there."

  "I was in Moo Bat Yai. I couldn't leave."

  "But why? For a month?" Norma's heart began to pound faster.

  "Twelve."

  "Twelve?"

  "Twelve. Headman Honey. His wife. His oldest son. A guy from the Fish clan—you don't know him, he's new. His wife. And the rest from down the hill, four in the Wood clan, and three from the Rabbit clan."

  "Oh my," said Norma. "Have you told your father yet?"

  "Not yet."

  "Go now. He'll be so proud he could die."

  Norma was right, as usual. Thomas was so proud of his son that he could die. For the two years following his return, David wandered the mountains, carrying nothing but a small backpack and his guitar. Norma could not help but hold her breath when David was gone, but she loved the moment when he walked back in the door. On Thomas's map of the Dyalo villages of northern Thailand, the purple pins, which indicated a wavering people, and the black pins, which indicated the deepest heathenism, steadily turned white, one after another.

  David had been back in Thailand for a little over two years, Norma told me, when Laura had her stroke. She was sitting in the garden on a bamboo-and-rattan chair that her grandson Paul had made for her as a Christmas present when she felt a little weak on her left side. That was all she felt, just a little weak, but when she tried to stand up, she collapsed on the crabgrass lawn, and it was almost an hour until Norma found her lying there. She didn't mind the wait, Laura told the family later, because that's when she saw the very first of her crosses. At first she wasn't sure if it was anything more than the play of light and shadow on the cement foundations of the house, but as she lay there, wondering just what was going wrong with the left side of her body and feeling very frightened, she realized that it was a cross, and she could even see the grain of the wood if she looked closely. When she looked even more closely, she saw stains from His blood.

  The family took her to the hospital, and took her home, and she spent her last year sitting in her rocking chair. For the rest of her life, Laura saw the crosses regularly. She saw them in the dust motes playing in the late-afternoon light, in the irregular formations of early monsoon clouds out the windows, in the dirt on the floor, even in the folds of the fake-leather couch. Laura had thought, leaving Eden Valley, that her happiest days were behind her, but she was wrong.

  "She was so happy," Norma said. "She couldn't talk much, but she had such a big smile, that was the best time of her life. There was a real peace in the house right before she died. Do you know what her last words were? Her last words were, ‘Thank you.' Isn't that a beautiful way to go Home?"

  "It is," I agreed.

  Norma was silent for a long minute.

  "It was hardly after that at all that that woman …"

  Just eleven months after Laura died, two young Lisu boys found David's partially decomposed body in a remote valley to the northwest of Chiang Mai. He had fallen a great distance, then been shot twice in the back. He was buried beside Laura in the family plot at the Chiang Mai Foreigners' Cemetery.

  PART THREE

  THE NATIVE'S POINT OF VIEW

  ONE

  PAK NAI

  THERE WAS NO NATURAL END to Walkerology, and in the spirit, if not the endurance, of the heroic Sir Richard Jebb, who studied all— and only—the seven surviving plays of Sophocles for upwards of sixty years, I would have been content to study the Walkers for a very long time.

  But then the Walkers stopped talking. Just what happened I'm not sure. For a happy month, I interviewed Walker after Walker, taking them aside with my notebook and tape recorder, asking questions. They'd been eager to talk to me; a few even said that they wished their kids were as interested in the family history as I was. But then, sometime in mid-April, nobody seemed to have time to talk to me anymore. I don't think that I offended anyone. Maybe I said the wrong thing. I don't know. Aunt Helena went back to the States to visit her children. Tom Riley stopped having breakfast with me, saying he'd put on ten pounds since we'd started meeting and he'd call me when he lost the spare tire. The truth, I suspected, was that things were going so well with Judith that he no longer felt the need for my services. I figured he'd call when they had their first fight. Everyone was still nice to me on the phone and very polite and still said "God Bless You" before they hung up, but everyone inevitably had other commitments or was going off somewhere really exotic without me or on prayer dates with other Christians, to which I, of course, being a heathen, had not been invited.* It's possible, I suppose, that middle April is just a very busy time for missionaries, as it is for accountants, what with Easter and the existential despair which inevitably accompanies the humid days toward the end of the hot season. I even stopped by the big pink house one day uninvited, but only Ah-Mo was around, and in her broken Thai she explained to me that Thomas and Nomie had gone-gone, far-far, and wouldn't be back for a month.

  They hadn't even said goodbye.

  It might seem strange, but in the absence of the Walkers I fell into deepest gloom. It was right before the Songkran holidays. Brown clouds covered the city. But it would not rain. I took a shower in the morning, another at midday, then one in the early evening, and a final one before bed; and after every shower, I dusted myself liberally with mentholated prickly heat powder. All day long there were tantalizing moans of distant thunder on the horizon, falsely suggesting that soon, very soon, achingly soon, the explosion of the monsoon would be on the city. Or worse: standing on the crabgrass lawn outside our concrete house under the swaying palms, I would feel a fast wind stirring up, and then a single, immensely large plop of rain would tumble on my upturned forehead. And then—nothing. The thunder would roll over again, the dogs would dart for shelter, the palms would sway in the wind, and then—nothing.

  Meanwhile, I was almost broke. All that time with the Walkers, I wrote nothing. I did not pitch a single story. I would rather have been Left Behind than write one more word about another local jazz quartet, wood carver, pub, pizzeria, or tailor. The Thai gazillionaire who had once asked me to write short summaries of English-language business books had been implicated in some incomprehensible Thai financial scandal; I sent an e-mail to his secretary, offering to summarize books about criminal justice, but got no response.

  Rachel's questions about the year to come were growing more insistent. She wanted us to figure out where we were headed and what we planned to do with ourselves. If we didn't take action soon, she faced an-

  *Not one of the Walkers ever attempted in any way to preach the Gospel to me. There was an occasional flutter of curiosity about my own religious beliefs, which the Walkers assumed I held as intensely as they hewed to theirs, but otherwise they betrayed a complete indifference to the state of my soul. You tell me why.

  other year teaching the first grade. The children at the school were no less susceptible than the adults to the weather, and Rachel came home drained, with stories about breaking up fights and cruel teasing and tears. There were Byzantine political intrigues among the elementary school teachers. The fourth-grade teacher would not talk to the fifth-grade teacher because the fifth-grade teacher refused to erase the chalkboard when her class was done. It was a point of pride.

  I stopped sleeping well at night and had strange dreams, and I woke up in the morning unrefreshed, anxious and sweaty. But I took good naps. In the afternoon, after eating a bowl of noodles on the corner, I would stagger back to the house, focus the fan on the ceiling the better to diffuse its cooling waves across my clammy back, close my eyes, and then an hour would be lost, my pillow damp with drool. With the Walkers gone, Martiya's story stalled; my life felt purposeless and stale; days drained into weeks.

  Itinerant peddlers pushed handcarts along our suburban streets or balanced long bamboo poles across their narrow shoulders, selling brooms and fans made from wild mountain grass, medic
inal herbs, thin pancakes, splotchy speckled eggs roasted over a charcoal fire, lacquerware pots from Burma, tin locks and metal pans from China, and fruit— rose apples, lychees, pineapple, and mango. I woke up one late afternoon to the musical tinkle of the fruit man's bell. Only the thought of icy-cold pineapple got me out of bed. Wearing shorts and flip-flops, I stumbled out of the house as the evening wind, which was not cooling, picked up with its false promise of rain. The wind made the bamboo howl like mating cats and the palms sway, and pushed southward the huge clouds, which drifted along slowly overhead like the alien invasion fleet from Xylon IV.

  My neighbor Baiyom had also scurried out of her cement hut to buy papaya and pineapple. "Hot it is!" Baiyom said sympathetically. She paid for her fruit and went home.

  I bought my pineapple and stood outside on the lawn, spearing the pineapple with my wooden stick. This was always a risky business because the plastic bags punctured easily, and once punctured the delicious juice would be lost. Slimy pineapple goobers dripped down my chin. The light outside was turning purplish like an eggplant.

  The phone rang inside the house. Thai telephones ring the way telephones ring in old movies, with an actual hammer striking an actual bell, and are very loud. I went inside to answer it. It was Karen Leon, who had not heard from me but had dreamed just the other night of Martiya and wanted to know if I was making any progress.