Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach

by Colin Cotterill

  In our case, this was Pooyai Beung. Pooyai literally translates as “big person.” So I sarcastically call him Bigman, in English, ’cause he’s not. I’ve never had cause to put Beung on a scale, but if I ever did, I doubt he’d weigh much more than a haddock. He’s in his sixties but remarkably upright. He dyes his sticky-up hair light brown, so he reminds me of a paintbrush. He has one wife here at home in Maprao, another lesser wife in Grajom Fy near the crematorium, and a girlfriend in Lang Suan. I doubt he has the stamina to trouble any of them between the sheets, but I don’t suppose that was the point of his assembling his harem. Beung is all about show. He has a closet full of uniforms he wears at the slightest excuse: volunteer highway patrol, village security unit, coastal alert force, scout leader, village headman’s association, and many more. I’d even seen him in camouflaged army fatigues putting manure around his palm trees. I hadn’t spotted him at first. I doubt he’s ever seen military service, but it seems anyone down here can dress up any way they like. On top of his uniform fetish and his odd looks, Bigman Beung is a sleazeball. So, it was with great reluctance that I rode Mair’s shopping bicycle around the bay to his house.

  “Aha! My favorite little starlet,” he said. “Just in time. I was starting to feel a bit stiff. How’s your massage skills?”

  He was lounging on a wooden recliner on the balcony in front of his house. He was wearing a military cadet jacket and unrelated shorts. He had a can of Leo beer at his elbow. It was seven A.M. His major wife was a few meters away from him, plucking chickens. A woman built like an industrial washing machine. I’d never heard her speak.

  “Pooyai Beung, there’s a head on the beach,” I said.

  “Just here,” he continued, pulling up one leg of his shorts to reveal a cadaverous thigh. “Real knotted it is. Must of pulled a muscle. Few minutes of massage should loosen it up … if it doesn’t have the opposite effect. Hee hee.”

  I doubted very much he had any muscles, and I was starting to wonder whether he had ears. Hadn’t I just told him there was a head on the beach? I tried again.

  “Beung, listen. There’s a human head just down from our resort. Washed up on the beach.” I described it.

  He smiled and his upper denture dropped like a guillotine. He used his tongue to push it back up.

  “Got legs, has it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “This head of yours. Has it got legs?”

  “It’s a head. If it had legs, it’d be a body and I would have said, ‘Beung, there’s a body on the beach.’ What we have is a head. Understand?”

  I suppose I should have shown more respect to our headman. There were people in our village who treated him with deference—only dared make fun of him behind his back. But there are thirteen villages in Maprao—population five thousand—and Bigman Beung was the grand overlord of village thirteen. At the most, fifty houses. Not exactly the mayor of New York City. And have I mentioned he’s a sleazeball?

  “If it’s got no legs,” he said, “it isn’t going anywhere, is it? Won’t be running off, will it? Still be there after the savings cooperative meeting. Not urgent, so no reason to call around to all the co-op members to cancel. Am I right?”

  “Not urgent?” I was getting agitated. “It’s somebody’s head. It used to be attached to that somebody’s body. He probably has family concerned about him. He could have been the victim of a murder. The perpetrator’s walking around this very minute looking for victim number two. And all because nobody’s reported a death. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “Nong Jimm,” he said. “Nong”—little sister—inevitably the launch pad for a condescending flight. I knew what was coming.

  “Nong, nong Jimm,” he repeated. He sipped at his breakfast beer and smiled with his tongue holding up his teeth to be sure they wouldn’t snap shut again. “What worries me is that such a sexy child as you is so hung up on bad things. Murder and evil-doers. Crime. Rape. The little breasts of teenaged girls being fondled. If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re well away from that world. It’s good for you to be here in our peaceful community so you can see how much love and kindness there is on the planet. We have loving for you, Jimm Juree. Right here.” His hand dropped absently to his crotch. “Cool that hot heart of yours.”

  That world he was referring to was the world of crime reporting. I’d been one small kidney failure away from becoming the senior crime reporter at the Chiang Mai Mail. Over a year had passed since my cruel wrenching from the job, so I imagined the old head of crime was already at that big AA meeting in the sky. They’d have given the post to annoying Arkom—great speller, lousy journalist—and it should have been mine. Jimm Juree, Thailand’s second female senior crime reporter. That sounded so right. Respected. Admired. Interviewed in Time Asia: “Thai Woman Achieves Greatness.” And where do I end up? Cook and dishwasher at the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant. Nearest town, Lang Suan: a place you’d only come to if the train broke down.

  “So, you aren’t going to inform the police?” I said.

  “Of course I will. Of course,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing. Head on the beach. Terrible. After our nine o’clock meeting I’ll hurry down there with a representative of the Coastal Alert Force to verify that it’s actually a head.”

  “You think I don’t know what a head looks like?”

  “Nong. Calm down. Of course you know what a head looks like. But you are merely stage one of the protocol, an unofficial eyewitness. Regulation fifteen states that all claims have to be substantiated by an incumbent official.”

  “So despite the fact it’s only five minutes’ motorcycle drive from your house and you have two hours to kill before your meeting, you’re just going to leave the head sitting there till … what time’s the meeting over?”

  “Ooh, could be about eleven.”

  “That’s four…?”

  I got it. Of course. I was being a bit slow that day. Paperwork. It was November, a month of high tides. By eleven there would be no beach. The head would have been washed away along the bay in the monsoon musical chairs that pushed all the garbage south and brought us a different batch. Every day you got a chance to experience new flotsam. The head would be somebody else’s problem by lunchtime. In my country a period of inactivity can solve almost every problem. I looked at my cell phone.

  “Can you confirm that it’s seven fifteen?” I said.

  He raised his splendid diver’s watch and said, “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” I said and snapped his photo.

  “For what?”

  “For completing the interview,” I said.

  “What interview?”

  “Yours.”

  I held up the cell phone for him to see his photograph.

  “You weren’t…?”

  “Recorded every word,” I said. “Sorry. I’d already reported the head to Thai Rat newspaper. They wanted me to go through the official channels to see how the system worked. I’ll just have to tell—”

  “Wait!” he said, glaring at my phone as if it was loaded and pointed at his head. “You mean a human head?”

  I had to laugh. I heard a cluck. As the chickens were dead, I assumed it had come from Beung’s wife.

  “Don’t bother, Beung,” I said. “I’m not recording anymore.”

  Beung looked concerned, but I’ve learned from experience that sleazeballs don’t get violent. They slime their way out of trouble.

  “My sweet little Nong Jimm,” he said. “How long have we been friends?”

  I was about to say “Never,” but he didn’t give me the chance.

  “This is clearly a misunderstanding brought about by our different cultures,” he said. “North meets south. Language difficulties. Only to be expected.”

  I was certain we’d been speaking central Thai together. He winked at me and reached for his cell-phone-on-a-string hidden among the amulets dangling from his neck. He speed-dialed and I could hear John Denver’s “Take Me Home” as he waited in a que
ue. Once he was connected, he said just two words,

  “Code M.”

  But then again I suppose M isn’t a word. I rode Mair’s bicycle back along the beach road and smiled to myself. Clever me. I knew there were cell phones with recording functions, but I didn’t have one of those.

  * * *

  We were having breakfast when the head-collection service began. We hadn’t told Mair about it. It might have meant nothing to her, but she was in a delicate state. A few years earlier she’d started to be overwhelmed by numbers and names and sequences of events. There were times when details of our family fluttered back and forth like candle-charred moths. She’d call me Sissi and start talking about the operation that had turned me from male to female. She’d see our long departed, virtually unknown father in the face of Grandad Jah and begin embarrassing anecdotes we had to nip in the bud. She regularly put on odd shoes and told us it was a fashion statement, and she was convinced those little packets of preservatives they put in food were condiments. She’d eaten so many she’d likely live to 150. The fact that these lapses were rare and that for long periods she would be the normal, caring person we loved, only served to make her condition all the more frustrating. We’d forget that this other person lived inside her. We were sure it wasn’t the actual Mair that had sold our family home in Chiang Mai and relocated us to this embarrassing five-cabin bungalow. Five banana-leaf gazebo tables. One half-empty shop. Dirty beach. Warm, jellyfish-infested water. We’d left real lives, careers, dreams to come with her because we knew she’d perish by herself. I left the newspaper. Brother Arny deserted his ambition to be the bodybuilding god of Thailand. Grandad Jah … well, he didn’t leave anything, but he was just as peeved as the rest of us because peeved was his natural state. Only Sissi had overcome filial responsibility and remained behind.

  November blew in annoying winds from the northeast. They kicked up sand and whipped the salt off the surf. So my little brother Arny had made walls of green plastic gauze on three sides of the restaurant gazebo. We lost our view of the ocean and the bay, of course, but the novelty of living on the coast had long since worn off. We did, however, have a splendid view of the car park while we ate.

  “We have generals,” said Mair.

  I looked up to see a truck parking in front of our shop and two men in military uniforms stepping out. The growl of the surf had blotted out their arrival.

  “That’s Bigman Beung, Mair,” I said. “The village headman. And Pot from the bicycle repair shop.”

  “But they have medals.”

  “Ribbons, Mair. You buy them with the uniform. They’re stitched on. Means nothing.”

  “They look so elegant.” She smiled. “I do love a man in uniform. Have I ever told you about my fling with the fighter pilot?”

  “Yes,” we all said.

  “He had such a peculiarly shaped—”

  “YES,” we said again.

  “Why are they here, do you suppose?” she asked.

  “Beach inspection,” I told her. “Looking for evidence to nail the households that throw their garbage in the river. Utilities bills. Photographs. Identifiable body waste for DNA testing.”

  My lie was backed up by the arrival of a dirty cream and brown truck from which stepped a police officer I’d never seen before. He was overweight and wore a toupee so obvious that it could have just been blown onto his head by the gales. It had been two months since my last official dealings with the Pak Nam police, and I knew that during that time a dozen officers would have come and gone. It was like a TV sitcom. You had your regulars who couldn’t leave: Major Mana because he had a thriving Amway direct-sales dealership here; Sergeant Phoom and constables Ma Yai and Ma Lek because they were born and grew up and raised families here and refused to leave; and my own darling Lieutenant Chompu because nobody else wanted him. But all the other actors were on their way to and from elsewhere: transfers, probationary placements, demotions, punishment. Pak Nam was one of those places to which they sent disreputable officers officially “transferred to inactive posts.” Pak Nam was the perfect location in which to be inactive. In fact, there were long periods, months even, when it was unavoidable.

  A third vehicle pulled up beside the police truck and filled our car park. It was a huge black SUV with a roll bar garnished with a stack of lights. On its doors was a familiar sticker: the rear view of a heroic man in overalls with a voluptuous but unconscious woman draped in his arms. Whenever I saw that logo, I had an urge to throw up. This was the symbol of the national rescue foundations—in our case those bold men of the SRM, the Southern Rescue Mission Foundation. Supposedly a charitable organization whose duty it was to facilitate the journey of the soul to a better place. First at the scene of accidents, murders, and suicides. There are those of us who see the men of the SRM as bloodsucking, money-grubbing, cold-hearted vultures. Charity is good business in Thailand. The missions often receive large sums of money in donations, find themselves bequeathed entire estates in wills. So being the first at the scene, getting there before any other foundation is, in my mind, a financial rather than a spiritual necessity. I’d been at accidents where two foundations were going at each other with tire irons while the victims bled to death on the road. I’ve seen foundation workers checking a pulse over and over at the scene of a drug overdose. A dead body, you see, is worth more bonus points than delivering victims to a hospital. Heaven forbid they should survive. Yet so vital have these goons become to the industry of death, the police no longer find it necessary to get their hands bloody. The collection and dispatch of bodies is left entirely to the foundations.

  The two dark-skinned men who climbed down from the SUV looked like Socrates and Ben, the rats from the movie Willard. They were dark and gristly. They joked with the policeman and nodded at our Coastal Alert Force. I’d told Beung that the head was to be found beneath the leaning palm, so they didn’t ask me to accompany them as they walked down to the sand together. They began picking their way through the garbage, then became a blur as they passed behind our gauze.

  “They’re very diligent,” said Mair.

  “Pollution, what can I say?” I told her. “Brings people together.”

  No more than ten minutes later, the entourage was back at the car park. I’d rather expected them to put the head in a polystyrene box. At the very least they could have carried it in the laundry basket I’d left covering it. I hadn’t in my wildest imagination expected Socrates, the taller of the rats, to be swinging the head like a censer at the end of its long hair. He wore one large yellow rubber glove. I was further astounded to see them produce a camera and take it in turns to pose with the head, beside their truck. I felt sick. They all knew we were sitting not twenty meters away, but they didn’t care. Beung and the policeman drove off. The SRM boys put the head in the back of their truck and washed their hands at our free tap. I turned to Mair. She was sitting there nursing her Titanic smile, the meaningless grin she wore whenever everything around her was sinking beneath the icy water of the Atlantic.

  “Poor man,” she said, and I knew she was referring to the head.

  I was outraged. I shot to my feet and pushed my little chest ahead of me as I marched across to their big shiny hearse. My brother Arny is built like the Terminator, but he’s gentle and pathetic in the nicest sense. I knew he dreaded the thought of a confrontation, but he was my sibling and I sensed his presence just behind me when I poked the skinny Ben rat in the chest.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  Skinny looked at me, then at Arny.

  “Washing.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “That head.”

  He was eyeing me up and down. I hate that. It was one of those times I really needed Arny to be as tough as he looked. I wanted him to say, “You look at my sister like that, and I’ll crush your head like a tin can,” or something equally gratuitous. But Arny was a jumbo jet with the disposition of a pigeon.

  “You a relative?” Socrates ask
ed. I presumed he meant of the head.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well then, I suggest you mind your own business,” he said.

  “But I found it.”

  “Ain’t you clever, sweetheart.”

  “And on his behalf I demand some respect.”

  They laughed.

  “You know what you can do with your respect?” He smiled. “You can stick it up your boyfriend’s back passage.”

  Arny surprised me by taking a step forward, but Ben rat was suddenly holding a flick knife, thumb against his chest, blade forward. I had no idea how he got it in his hand so fast, but he had a look on his face that said he’d used it before. He glared at Arny, who’d frozen to the gravel.

  “Come on, Twinkie,” he said. “Let’s see how much skin you lose before you get to me.”

  He smiled. All his left side teeth were missing. His lips were sucked into the void when he spoke.

  “I’m a reporter for the Chiang Mai Mail,” I said, unable to keep the tremor out of my voice.

  “Ooh, that’s scary.” Socrates laughed again, and suddenly he had a knife too. What was it with these people?

  “Write without fingers, can you?” he asked.

  “You can’t frighten me,” I said, although by then it was quite obvious from the lack of blood in my face that he could. He stepped right up to me and leaned down so my face was bathed in his wormy breath. I was determined not to step back. I glared, half-heartedly.

  “Just in case you forget,” he said, “you didn’t find anything on the beach this morning. OK?”

  I’ve learned that there are very few situations where smart-arse responses don’t do wonders for the atmosphere. This was one of them.

  “OK,” I said.

  He looked at Arny, who was as white as Finland.

  “OK?” he asked.

  “OK,” said Arny in a remarkably high-pitched voice.

  Before that morning, menace had always been a concept I’d had trouble defining. Here were two losers, skinny hombres, nerds with switchblades. See them shopping at the market and you’d think yourself lucky you hadn’t been reincarnated as one of them. But even then, as you passed them by, you’d feel the loose connection. Smell the burning wires. There’d be something about them that would make your skin crawl. And you’d look in their eyes, and you knew they weren’t playing. They were the real thing. They’d kill you as soon as let you have the last pumpkin (I’m still with the market analogy here). Menace, that was them. They walked a slow lap around us, prodding with the tips of their knives. I was half expecting them to piss up against our legs. They owned us.