That Savage Water

by Matthew R. Loney

  The sky through the roof beams brightened the room. From the opening a raccoon spied at him. Startled by the door, it perched guiltily out of reach. Behind him, the fire outside was centered in the doorway, a perfectly contained rectangle of light.

  Still hanging on the nails that punctured the log siding, his father’s hunting caps hung, limp and greasy. The old man once asked him to burn a stack of papers in the fireplace, so he’d gone and lifted the entire pile off the table. He squatted and fed them one by one into the fire: Old issues of Canadian Geographic, phone books, pharmacy prescription bags, grocery and hardware receipts, a few pages his father had scribbled on. He watched them curl into ashy feathers on top of the glowing logs. Wait now…Stop. Did you take those pages too? No. The ones I was writing on? Panic. No. Then the chair shoving backwards as his father stood up and the sound of his boots on the floor and the weight of his presence beside him as he stared silently for some time into the fireplace. I’ll write them for you again, Dad. No, he paused. A loss like that you don’t make up for with something else...

  Outside, the fire popped. A rash of embers exploded into the air. The raccoon shook its coat in a huff of fur, stared back one last time and then disappeared onto the roof. Its paws made a sound on the tin that reminded him of being underwater in a river – pebbles tumbling and clacking against themselves, wearing off their edges.

  His pocket vibrated again.

  It’s me – she said.

  I know.

  Do you think you could do it tonight? I mean, would you?

  Just one night, hon. The tent’s set up.

  Have you been inside yet?

  Yeah. The roof ’s a mess.

  I said it would be rotting. No one’s used it in so long.

  I didn’t think it’d been that long.

  So will you? – Her voice faded out and he could tell by its tone she was looking down.

  Alexis wouldn’t have wanted this. She wouldn’t have cared…

  No, not for her. Jesus Christ, it’s for you!

  It won’t change anything.

  It will!

  But how?

  You’ve just become so, I don’t know… – silence filled the receiver – …unbearable.

  He stared at the empty fireplace, the ash heaped and spread like a litter box. Grey raccoon prints faded out across the floor.

  Have I?

  Why the cabin? he’d asked her one night in bed, her back towards him smooth as a dawn lake, the pink curve of her hip that after twenty years still fit perfectly into his palm. What difference would it make now? Why more loss after so much already? Because I don’t want to resent you – she’d said – And because you need to know what it’s like to lose something for good. On purpose. Forever. You don’t think I did? We both lost her. Alexis was ours. It’s not the same, her hip rolled from his hand. I mean, stop trying to save her and lose something completely.

  He ignored everything on the inside that told him he was right, that it wouldn’t make any difference, that cabins didn’t equal children. That the ocean had only done to Alexis what she’d tried to do to herself so many times yet never managed. That death would always come when you couldn’t prevent it, rolling you over and over until your skull, at last, met something harder. That when she’d left for India right out of the hospital, she had turned her back on everything he’d done to try and help her. What’s India got for you anyway? What’s there you can’t find here? Everything, Dad. And by God I mean that. Everything.

  Alright. If it means that to you...

  Not for me – she refuted – Jesus. This is for you.

  For me.

  How can you not get that?

  A loss like that. Equal.

  The path to the shore was free of blow-down. It was just a tree-lined tunnel leading to the lake, crisp with moonlight. He spotted a dead cedar off the path and grabbed a hold of its trunk, tugging its grey burl of branches onto the trail. This would do it. He didn’t agree he needed to lose something more. Alexis had been both of theirs. You don’t make up for something broken by breaking something else, he reasoned. But this would prove it for her and that’s what was needed to move on.

  The tree barely fit through the door of the cabin. He bent his knees and pulled with force. A branch hooked under the drying rack and the two dinner plates smashed to the floor. Like the wake of a boat a trail of copper leaves followed him in. He could have started it on the porch but it would be a better fire this way, from the inside. A curl of birch bark held the flame alight as he brought it past the tent to the porch and then through the door. Was it true he was unbearable? That she’d resent him? Would they recover on the surface yet somewhere deep beneath, down the line, this would thunder into them again, collapsing roofs, sweeping away buildings, another child, igniting forgotten underground fires?

  Fuck you – he exhaled as he lit the tree. Fuck you.

  The dry cedar caught fire with more speed than he expected. The branches hissed and twined as the hungry flames built. It was close enough that the easy chair soon caught and then the wooden cabinets, which brought the fire over to the wall. He’d never seen one spread so quickly. It poured over the surfaces like a liquid and then sat still to dig in its stubborn teeth. It licked at the hems of the curtains then shot up the walls toward the ceiling. It leapt the wooden stairs and then started in on the roof.

  At first from outside he could barely tell it was on fire. Drizzles of smoke escaped from under the roof ’s overhang, more like a wet sock that steamed as it dried. Muffled pops, the faint sound of crackling, then the warm, earthen glow of someone curled up inside reading a book with a beer and old moccasins. In the loft window the flames took hold of the plaid curtain and mauled it down.

  A loss like that. Sure.

  He stood confronting the burning cabin in the dark of the damp grass and dialed the phone.

  Did you?

  Yeah. Just now.

  Thank God – she said – Thank you, oh thank God.

  I don’t feel any better.

  You will – her voice sounded lighter, relieved – I promise you will.

  He turned his back to the clearing and followed the path to the lake. The water seemed black and distant, as though it contained something sinister inside it that he would forever connect to what it had done to Alexis, as though its reflection mirrored back at him something more than just the shredded moon. The guilt of a good lie, perhaps – the kind people tell themselves with a straight face for a lifetime. Or the pale of her skin with all the sadness it had collected from some place he was never invited into. The red of her bandaged wrists and how in his mind he’d always held on to her, clinging even harder as she fought and struggled to get away. His girl. Unbearable.

  Then, as if to wound it, he picked up a rock and threw it. The surface shattered, swallowing the hole in its splash. In endless, detached circles, the moonlight rippled outward and then gradually reformed. He could break its reflection a thousand times, with a thousand rocks, and always the moon would repair itself. Invariably the water’s surface would heal. On the far edge of the lake, the beam from the lighthouse spun in slow rhythmic flashes. Down here he couldn’t hear the fire, just the soft vacuum of forest and the constant rustle of waves onto shore stone.

  SOFT CORAL, SINKING PEARL

  Myaing renamed herself Mali the moment the lights of the patrol boat had extinguished behind the breakers. Hidden up the beach behind a fallen palm trunk, she listened as the surf buried the throb of the engine like shovels of wet sand. As far as she could tell, she’d been the only one to make it to shore. The soldiers must have hauled the others back into the boat under the frantic spotlight that illuminated the open-nosed machine guns that sprayed out their ammunition so endlessly. She studied the water for any sign of her sister: Nu was the stronger swimmer and might already be waiting farther up the beach. Mali’s clothes and hair were drenched, her tiny chest heaving wit
h exertion and adrenaline as she pressed herself down into the dark warmth of the foreign sand.

  Thailand. Thailand.

  She repeated the word over and over to herself, her hands gripping into the beach – a billion tiny fragments of this new country.

  The larger boat had approached in total darkness about five hundred metres from the shore. Suddenly to their port side, there had been nearly a dozen soldiers shouting with weapons aimed. The Thai had been too quick and ferocious to understand, but everyone in her wooden rowboat knew how to translate gun. Half of them had leapt over the side when the light from the patrol craft switched on. The older ones crouched against the bottom ribs of the boat, ducking their heads beneath the seat planks as if the beam itself could wound them. Then the soldiers began to fire.

  Myaing dove as deep as she could. Thrashing sounds sank down from the surface as others jumped in after her. Bullets whizzed mechanically through the water and shattered the coral in sharp but muted detonations. Reaching a depth where she had to depressurize her ears, she began swimming forward with the push of the waves. When her chest began to burn, she pulled herself up to the dark surface. From somewhere in the black, she heard Nu’s voice scream out for her – Myaing! Myaing! – but she gulped another lungful of air and then plunged again. There was something about diving away from the sound of her sister’s cries that made the nerves in her skin vibrate their cold, as if the water had deliberately wanted to come between them, to drive them apart like the wedge of teakwood their father had used to split bamboo. Promise we won’t wait for each other, Nu had whispered, her thin arms tight around her sister’s waist. We’ll meet up on shore. Just keep swimming. Promise me, Myaing. She had to command her body to continue towards land; it hurt like a cramp in her heart.

  Eventually, her outstretched hands contacted sand. She crawled from the surf up the beach and ran into the darkened jungle hoping the light from the full moon hadn’t given her away. The sound of Nu’s cries roared in her head against the insect noise: Myaing!

  Change your name immediately – her father had advised – And you must know, my precious goose, there will be no point mourning for us. The moment you feel Thailand beneath your feet, send us a prayer, change your name and forget Burma – Then he looked at Nu, furrowing his brow into creases that reminded her of freshly planted rows of rice. In the wet of his eyes, minnows reached their lips towards the surface, breaking it into ripples.

  Past the breakers, the lights of the army boat crested with the waves and then vanished. She scanned the surf for any sign that Nu or anyone else from her boat had made it to shore. She waited motionless as bark in the lanky shadows of the coconut trees that bisected the sand down to the water. When a distant succession of gunshots cracked in Mali’s ears, their shaggy caps didn’t flinch; the moon didn’t bother to blink.

  The wooden porch of the palm hut was littered with empty bottles and cigarette butts. Mali knocked on the door before entering. She set down her bucket of cleaning supplies in the corner of the room like a full vase of plastic flowers. She stripped the foam mattress of its sheets and pillowcases, tied the mosquito net in a knot and then set about tidying the hut. Except for gathering the garbage and sweeping the sand back out to the beach, the only job left was to empty the pail of used paper from beside the toilet. Farang, she had come to learn, were disgusting and they didn’t know how to contain their own shit. All a human needs to use is water – Mali thought, emptying the putrid pail – What about the process could be simpler? Why leave so much paper behind like a prize to be found? Monkeys they were, at play with their own excrement.

  The backpackers would sleep until the sun had already begun its downward curve, reflecting in the stale puddles of vomit pocking the sand outside their beach bars from the previous evening. Into the mornings, their music would thump through the woven siding of her hut and she’d lay awake under the blur of her mosquito net wondering how long it would take before she could begin to work in the kitchen with Luang and the rest of the Burmese women. She would listen to them chattering softly in her native language about the husbands and children they’d left behind in Yangon or Mandalay or the smaller vil ages along the coast that nobody in the world, besides them, even knew existed.

  Every few weeks a new Burmese girl arrived on the beach looking for work. It was as though Phram could smell her foreign scent of desperation as she crawled from the sea. For now, it was Mali’s turn to choose. If she did what he wanted, maybe then Phram would say – Mali, from today you work in the kitchen – as he led the newest sea-washed girl into his hut and latched the door.

  What a price to pay – she thought – cancelling out the last private part of yourself. She wondered if it could possibly be worth it and what her sister and brother and father would say.

  Phram gets what he wants – Luang spat on the ground into the mango peels – He’ll make you take it up your ass, that dirty pecker. I should poison his khao soi, but the trouble is he’s too clever.

  He’ll smell it.

  He has a nose like a tapir. Hand me that plate – Luang said – He’s too ugly to get a girlfriend so he’s bitter. But if you sleep with him, he’ll move you in here. Think of that! You could cook with me in the kitchen.

  I don’t mind cleaning.

  Phram says Burmese girls give the best head. Do you even know what that is?

  Yes – Mali lied – I know.

  Believe me, it isn’t fair, but you make twice as much here in the kitchen. During high season, you won’t even be thinking of Burma. And just think, if you met a handsome foreigner. Would you fall in love with someone carrying a cleaning bucket?

  Mali peered over the counter to where the farang were. Hammocks criss-crossed the wooden deck, coils of mosquito repellant lit beneath the sagging crescents. They ashed joints in large beer bottles and wore black market T-shirts sewn in Bangkok. Phram was standing at one of the hammocks cooing in English with a red-haired farang girl. All Mali could see were knots of the girl’s dreadlocks tangled like a lump of brain coral.

  I think they’re horrible, Luang. Where could they possibly come from that they’re so happy to turn their skin brown anyway?

  Luang’s knife slid through the yellow flesh of the mango, dissecting off cubes with the blade – Do you know Kulap from down the beach? Paradise Bungalows? She makes her own cream that whitens your skin in only one day. You’d need two days, Mali, because you’re so black. But I’m sure she would give you a discount.

  I’m not so black.

  You’re the darkest girl here. But don’t worry. Farang like black skin – Luang’s laugh looked like the chopped up mango. She hiked up her shorts made from pink cotton printed with penguins and then took the plate over to the counter.

  Phram! – she groaned – Take this to the boys at the pool table.

  Go fuck yourself – he said in Thai, not even looking over from the girl’s hammock. His hands rested on the fabric sides like the gunwales of a boat – Can’t you see I’m busy?

  Sure – she grumble to Mali – As busy as the asshole of a pig.

  Luang slid out from behind the bar, crossed the deck and set the plate beside the three boys playing pool. They stood like awkward roosters, their bellies out and shirtless, scratching at the sweaty nooks beneath their swim shorts. Mali’s brother Than was what she considered a handsome man, not these sun-rashed farang patched with tattoos.

  Dis is Mary Kissmas mango – Luang said, giving a light bow, her English deeply accented.

  You order that, Miles? – one of them said.

  No – the one named Miles said.

  Hey, Carl. You order a fucking Merry Kiss-my-ass mango?

  Yeah, I did. Screw off, why don’t you.

  Think I can get her to feed it to me?

  Try it.

  Fuck off, Bosh. Leave her be.

  Yeah, well – he snapped up a piece with his fingers – you can take her. She’s got a fat n
ose anyway.

  Hey. Can I get a beer? – the one named Miles said – A large one? Chang’s alright.

  One large Chang – Luang said.

  Yeah. Kap koon krup.

  Clap poon crap – the one named Bosh laughed – What the hell, man. You speaking Thai now?

  Fuck off – Miles said, and then leaned over the pool table to take his shot – You’re a jerk sometimes.

  Mali didn’t want to deal with farang directly like Luang had to. She had never seen so much white skin before coming to Ko Yao. Their bodies were shaped like octagons that turned crimson in the sun. Between cleaning each hut, she’d watch them slam themselves against the towering waves, their arms and legs emerging from the froth as they frolicked like albino horses. There was something hypnotic about watching them scan the horizon for the largest crests then turn towards the shore, paddling furiously until their bodies lifted atop the curling swells and then rode like planks nearly to the shore. For hours they played this game with the sea. To her envy, they had no fear of the water, no fear of the sun, of drugs. No fear of anything that might hurt them. Mali opened the door of the last empty hut, the gecko lizards darting across the beams of the porch.

  As she stepped inside the hut, the smell hit her hard. She covered her nose with her arm, set the cleaning bucket down and moved cautiously around the room as though not to startle the culprit into releasing any more of its reek. At the far corner of the bed a crumpled-up top sheet lay near the window. Something about its colour, its position was already strange – like it had been rolled and placed there deliberately, as far away from the doorway as possible.

  Farang… – she said to herself – How can the universe work this way?