Return to Tomorrow

by Marisa Carroll

  She knew they should stay here in Chiang Khong, at one of the cheap hotels, if not with Ahnle’s relatives, and rest. Yet, neither of them was prepared to accept the delay. Ahnle’s brother would surely be on their trail by now, and Rachel knew they couldn’t take the risk of allowing him to catch up with them.

  Not Ahnle’s brother—or an equally angry Brett Jackson.

  “I do not know how much opium my uncle offered him to cross the river for us. My brother bargained for our passage,” Ahnle said. Rachel had heard the whole story before, of course, on the bus ride north, but she listened patiently. It had come in disjointed bits and pieces that first time, as they pored over a map of the Golden Triangle Rachel had purchased at Chiang Mai, trying to pinpoint as closely as possible the area of Ahnle’s village in Laos. Anything she might remember by telling the story again was worth listening to.

  “It doesn’t matter how much opium your uncle paid for the crossing. We haven’t got any.” As always, Rachel tried to empty her mind of anger toward the hill people, who grew opium poppies as they had for generations only as a medium of exchange, nothing more. It was the dealers, the middlemen and pushers who made life miserable for so many, not subsistence farmers, who only followed age-old patterns of trade and barter.

  “Do we have enough money?” Ahnle’s voice was barely a whisper. They had heard others talking on the trip north, stories of bandits and of Khen Sa coming down from Burma to deal for the opium crop and the danger there was to villagers and strangers alike, traveling even on government buses, when he was in the area.

  “We’re doing fine,” Rachel reassured her. Actually, they had a little over a thousand baht. About fifty dollars. Not much, but it would have to do. She was hoping in the depressed economy of Chiang Khong, she’d be able to get Ahnle’s cousin traded down to a reasonable figure, not from family feeling—he sounded every bit as opportunistic as Ahnle’s half brother—but because she was offering something even more valuable than raw opium: cold, hard cash.

  They trudged through the muggy heat, Ahnle peering carefully at each rickety house, all on stilts, most leaning at precarious angles along the water’s edge. The air was filled with the heavy smells of river mud, garbage and raw sewage, relieved sweetly and unexpectedly by the occasional scent of honeysuckle or jasmine. Small children laughed and ran beneath the houses, ran in and out of the river, naked and carefree, chasing scrawny chickens and being chased by equally scrawny pigs.

  A hundred yards farther on the village began to peter out. The houses were farther apart here, even more dilapidated, the children quieter, as though they didn’t have the energy to run and play. Even the pigs and chickens and occasional goat were quiet, dispirited. Rachel shivered despite the heat. This was where the hill people and Lao refugees made their homes, slightly apart from the rest of the village, balanced precariously on the edge of poverty.

  “There,” Ahnle said suddenly, her voice filled with relief. “That is the sister of my mother. There, working in her garden.” She hurried forward, stopping outside the rickety fence of bamboo stakes and bowed low, dropping to her knees to show respect to her aunt, who was kneeling among a row of cabbages. “Mother’s sister,” she said, steepling her fingers before her in greeting. “It is I, Ahnle. I have come from the missionary’s camp.”

  “Sister’s daughter,” replied the wizened old woman, who Rachel knew was probably only a decade older than she was herself. No trace of surprise showed on her face at Ahnle’s sudden, unexpected appearance on her doorstep. “Do the spirits leave you well?”

  “I am well, Aunt, no evil spirit troubles my body.”

  “Good. But why do you come here, Niece? I have nothing extra to spare for you.”

  “I ask nothing of you, Aunt. I seek your son, Bohan.” Ahnle continued to stare at the ground between them, not at her aunt’s weather-beaten, almost toothless face.

  “He is within.” She gestured with her head at the house behind her. “What do you seek from him?” Her straw hat shadowed her face; her voice held no inflection.

  “I…I must return to my village.”

  “For the child?” The older woman’s expression didn’t change. She never even looked in Rachel’s direction, although Rachel, too, had dropped to her knees to show the proper respect to one older and wiser than herself.

  “You know of my son?” Ahnle bowed lower, then straightened her shoulders and raised her eyes almost level with her aunt’s, showing that she considered herself, in this matter at least, to be her equal.

  “We know. Your brother came here when he took the child across the river.”

  “Was my son well?”

  “A fine boy for one without ancestors.” Ahnle hung her head, then lifted her chin.

  “We wish to bargain for passage to the other side of the river.”

  “Bohan will not bargain with a girl, one who has disgraced our family.” The old woman returned to her weeding, effectively dismissing Ahnle’s gesture of defiance.

  “I will bargain with your son, Wise Mother.” Rachel removed her sunglasses and looked at Ahnle’s aunt, focusing on a point at eye level, somewhere near her ear. To have made eye contact while arguing would have been interpreted as a sign of contempt. “A farang woman who speaks our tongue and who knows our customs.” She paused, considering. “I have heard of one such as you from the traders who sometimes come here with my son. I did not believe you existed. I thought they talked of poppy smoke dreams.”

  “I exist, Wise Mother.”

  “I will tell Bohan that you wish to see him.” The old woman made a wai, returning Rachel’s earlier greeting. “Times are hard here. He will take you across the river if you bargain with him.”

  “We have sufficient means to bargain, but not to be taken advantage of,” Rachel said firmly, but politely.

  Ahnle’s aunt nodded. “Good. You will do well with him and I will remind him to show respect to my sister’s spirit, even though her daughter has not.” She gave Ahnle another hard glance, then nodded toward her home. “Come inside.”

  RACHEL AND AHNLE paused on the ridge above the tiny village of thatch-roofed huts. Smoke curled in thin, lazy spirals from holes in their roofs and from larger fires scattered around the settlement. The scent of wood smoke was heavy in the thin, humid air. Outside the dozen or so huts, women and children went about the chores of daily life. Two water buffalo were penned in a bamboo corral in the middle of the village, protected from prowling animals and marauding Pathet Lao irregulars. A few straggle-tailed chickens and tiny, Vietnamese pigs scratched and rooted under the oxen’s feet. One woman was milking goats. Four or five young boys were practicing with bows and arrows, a favorite Hlông weapon. Smaller boys and girls raced along behind one lucky youngster who was hurtling down the muddy street on what appeared to be a board with wheels attached. Their screams of laughter and delight echoed off the hills and floated upward to Rachel and Ahnle.

  “Is this your village, Ahnle?” Rachel asked softly. There were no men to be seen; most likely they were off hunting in the hills around them. She was surprised they hadn’t been seen and stopped already by one of the keen-eyed hunters. A small field of poppies filled the only level space around the village, while the huts clung precariously to the hillside. It was too early for the poppies to be in bloom at this altitude. The field was deserted.

  “Yes,” Ahnle replied. “This is my village. We have found it. We will go down, and I will speak to my uncle, the dzoema. He makes all the decisions in the village. He will say if I can take my son away, or not.”

  “Yes.” Rachel’s heart was pounding in her chest from excitement and anticipation. It didn’t seem possible to her that the nightmare journey she’d set out on with so much dread was almost at an end. Everything had gone well. She’d bargained Ahnle’s cousin down to eight hundred baht; three hundred when they reached Laos, the rest when they safely returned.

  Crossing the river had been easy. Bohan had merely taken his boat downstream on the Thai s
ide of the river, then angled across to the Lao side at a place where the great river narrowed and curved between marsh-lined banks. There he had replaced the Thai flag above the motor with the Pathet Lao flag, cut the engine to something like trolling speed and drifted on downstream. They met only one other boat, as rickety and unprepossessing as Bohan’s, on the Lao side of the river. The fishermen in it, occupied with their lines, barely gave them a second glance.

  Several kilometers below Chiang Khong, Bohan nosed the boat into a tributary stream almost completely hidden by the drooping branches of a willow-like tree, then continued upstream, fishing lines trailing astern. An hour later, somewhere near midmorning, they stopped. The stream had narrowed considerably. Along the shore the ruins of several small huts and two or three derelict rowboats were all that remained of a fishing village. Bohan guided the boat ashore.

  “I go no farther,” he announced, spitting dark red betel-nut juice into the water. “Pay me now.”

  Rachel reached into her yaam and produced the money, a bundle of ten-baht notes. If Ahnle’s cousin intended to rob them and strand them on this inhospitable shore, she had no idea what she would do to stop him. She could only rely on the Hlông superstition that to harm a defenseless woman would bring the evil phi spirits down on you with a vengeance.

  Bohan took the money without touching her and waved them out of the boat. “To find the village, follow the stream to the waterfall. Above that there is a trail, very faint. It is two days’ walk for women. I will come back in five days at sunrise. Only once. If you are not here when I return you will have only the spirits to guide you back.” He’d smiled then, an ugly, gap-toothed smile out of a mouth stained red from betel juice.

  “And you will be five hundred baht poorer than you are today.” Rachel refused to be cowed.

  “Five sunrises.” He backed away from the shore, waiting until the stream widened sufficiently to turn the boat around. The current was swift. He was soon lost to sight.

  “We must go,” Ahnle said.

  “Yes.” Rachel took a moment to look around her. She was back in Laos, a country that held only memories of hardship and terror and loss for her. Yet the scene before her was peaceful and serene. The huts were derelict, long abandoned, housing only rodents, or more horribly still, cobras. The boats were equally derelict except for one which, while just as weather-beaten as the rest, appeared to be well-patched, with a pair of oars laid beside it where it was overturned in the reeds at the stream’s edge.

  A smuggler’s skiff, Rachel decided with a shiver of returning fear, used to transport opium out to the river where it could be transferred to larger river-worthy craft. If this was indeed an opium transfer point, it was no place to linger.

  “We must go,” Ahnle repeated. “Not good here.” Rachel shouldered her yaam and started walking away from the stream into the trees.

  They stayed within earshot of the water, catching glimpses now and then of the stream growing narrower and wilder as they climbed into the hills. They ate dried fruit and cheese from their stores as they walked. Darkness came early and they camped above the waterfall Bohan had described to them, in an outcropping of rocks that offered some protection, however slight, from the rare tigers, or more likely, wild boars and snakes. They rigged a tiny lean-to from a square of plastic draped across tree branches and ate boiled rice and tea they made in an aluminum pan over a fire.

  Rachel fully expected the sounds of the jungle to keep her awake, the horror of other nights spent lost in the limitless rain forest to haunt her dreams, but she was wrong. She slept restlessly, it was true, because the night was cold and damp and they had only the cheap Chinese blankets from the Chiang Mai market to cover themselves. She didn’t dream at all and woke with the dawn to a dreary, overcast sky and the threat of rain.

  Now it was late afternoon. They followed narrow trails into the hills all day. At the top of a steep ridge they looked down to find the village Ahnle recognized as her own spread out below them on the other side. Rain clouds piled up behind the hills, ringing the far side of the valley, and thunder rumbled in the distance. The rainy season might have ended, officially, but that didn’t mean the rain was gone for good.

  “We go down, now,” Ahnle said, leading the way. Her expression was strained and Rachel’s heart ached for the anxiety she must be feeling over their upcoming confrontation with the village elders and the couple who had custody of her son. “We will go in through the spirit gate. We do not want to enter the village any other way and anger the phi spirits. Or my uncle.”

  “Certainly not.” As far as Ahnle was concerned, her uncle was almost as powerful as the spirits themselves.

  “Do you think my uncle will see us at once?” Ahnle pulled a square of gaily colored silk from her bag to tie over her hair. Rachel did the same.

  “I hope so.” As Rachel spoke it began to rain.

  AHNLE SAT, HER LEGS folded under her, in the near darkness of the women’s side of her brother’s house. It was still raining outside, softly, as if the sky were weeping. The feeble light from a kerosene lantern cast strange, misshapen shadows on the mat walls. They had been in the village for several hours and she had not been allowed to see her uncle or her son. Her brother’s second wife, with her new baby son, had welcomed her to their section of the house, but her brother’s first wife had not so much as spoken a word of greeting.

  The others were all asleep, including Rachel, curled up in her blanket on a mat near where Ahnle sat. In the morning her uncle would see her and hear her plea for the return of her son.

  She wasn’t brave and fearless as Rachel was. She would not have had the courage to stand up to the terrible men in the bar to save another as Rachel had saved her. She could not have stolen the car and the money from the dangerous man they called “Tiger,” as Rachel had. She could not have come back into the jungle where she had been held prisoner for so many years to aid another. She was not nearly brave enough and it shamed her.

  All she could do was speak from her heart of how much she loved her baby and wanted him with her. That would be enough.

  She lay down on her woven mat and pulled the blanket close around her. A man’s face crossed the dark space behind her eyelids where the spirits painted dreams and pictures and recalled you to scenes from the past; a dark face with white teeth that gleamed when he smiled. She liked the man called Billy Todd very much. He had been kind to her; he had protected her from the men in the Teak Doll. She remembered his voice in the darkness of the room in the dangerous Jackson’s house that was like the palace of the Thai king to her. She had pretended to be asleep while she listened to his rough, strong voice. She wished he had touched her, stroked her hair. She reached up, touching her silk-wrapped head in surprise. A maiden shouldn’t think such things. Then she remembered she was a maiden no longer, but a woman full grown. And she had no time to be thinking of men when she needed to be planning on how to regain her child.

  Anua, her brother’s second wife, who was two seasons younger than Ahnle, let her hold her infant while she washed the dust of the day from her elaborate silver-bangled headdress. Once a girl became a woman in the Hlông world, she almost never took it off. She even slept with it on. And baby girls wore caps from birth to accustom them to the weight and restrictions of the head-dresses they would don later in life. Ahnle’s brother had taken her headdress after she became pregnant. She had never seen it again. She no longer mourned its loss.

  “Your son cries much,” Anua had told her with a sad shake of her head, “especially at night.” Chengla’s fat, lazy wife was losing much of her beauty sleep.

  Anua thought Chengla’s wife could be persuaded to take the money to return Ahnle’s son. Chengla had a new, young second wife who would surely give him a son within the year, and his fat first wife would be comforted with the silver bangles she could buy with Ahnle’s gift. All Ahnle had to do was persuade her uncle that she could give her son a better life among the unbelievers.

  A tear roll
ed down her face and she brushed it away, furious with herself. Rachel had told her time and again that she could do whatever she wanted to do in her new life. Right now, the most important thing in that life was retrieving her child from her old one. She would not give up. She would not fail. On that fierce and uncharacteristic resolve she willed herself to sleep.

  “AHNLE, DAUGHTER of my younger brother’s second wife.” Ahnle bowed courteously to the wizened old man sitting on a pile of woven mats in the center of his four-room house, by far the grandest in the village. “You have come to petition for the return of your son, born to you by a man who was not your husband.”

  “Yes, Uncle, to my shame,” Ahnle replied formally, in a very small voice, but Rachel sensed a new pride and determination in the girl-woman and let a small sigh of relief sift past her lips. She had woken in the middle of the night and been unable to fall asleep again from worry over the outcome of this meeting, but so far Ahnle was holding up well.

  “Your brother brought the child back to us before the rains. He said you could not care for him.”

  “I thought I could not but now things have changed.” Ahnle didn’t raise her head but spoke to the floor.

  “Why have things changed? You are still Hlông. They do not honor our people across the river.”

  “The unbelievers in the camp honor all who work hard to succeed. I have work that I do there. They pay me baht. I will be able to give Chengla and his wife a gift for their kindness in caring for my son all these months.”

  “Does she speak the truth?” he asked, turning bright, dark eyes on Rachel.

  “She does, Honored Father. She is my helper. I work for the missionary’s doctor at the camp.”

  “You have lived among us. You know our ways and our language. I believe what you say is true.” He took a deep puff of his cigarette. He was very old and very wise, but whipcord strong and capable of working long days in the fields, or hunting in the hills.