“Arny,” I said. “Remain calm. Don’t get into one of your flaps. If it helps, you can put your hands over your ears.”
I rolled down my window and gestured for the man to come to me. His footwear suggested he wasn’t police. I took a gamble.
“We’re hear to collect our father,” I said.
“There’s nobody here,” said the man. His voice and his teeth were great adverts for not smoking. “He’s probably left already.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” I said.
He squared his shoulders at me.
“If I tell you there’s nobody here, there’s nobody here. Just turn around and leave.”
Arny fumbled for reverse gear but I put my hand on his.
“I’m not leaving without my father,” I told him.
“I’ve told y – What does he look like?”
“About thirty centimeters high and silver.”
“What?”
“They cremated him yesterday. If we don’t take what’s left of him home, our Mair will give us no peace.”
The man hesitated. Fortunately he didn’t notice Arny’s look of shock. The sentry gazed once toward the temple, then back at us, then he stepped away and waved us through.
“Be quick,” he said as we passed.
“Thank you,” I replied, wai’d and wound up the window. “That’s weird, don’t you think? Closing a temple?”
“That wasn’t nice, pee.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Saying our dad’s dead.”
“You mean he’s not? Damn. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Its just…”
“I know. Not respectful. Can’t help but respect a creep who dumps a wife with three little babes.”
“He probably had his reasons.”
“Can’t you hate anyone, little brother? Can’t you just find it in your heart to sprinkle a handful of animosity here and there? This is the first time in thirty-two years our father’s been of any value to you. I think he’d be pleased to hear he’d contributed something, don’t you? Stop right here!”
“I…where?”
“Here. By the handcart.”
Arny pulled over and I opened the door.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Attacking from the rear.”
I climbed out.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pull up noisily in front of the prayer hall, go inside…and pray.”
“What for?”
If this had been a Catholic church he could have asked for our normal service to be resumed: careers, social lives, respect, access to decent cheese, but Buddhist temples didn’t do wish lists.
“Just fake it.”
I closed the door quietly and ran behind a bush. From there I could see him pull away with a confused look on his face. I watched him drive over to the prayer hall and park the truck. Four laymen and two monks immediately stepped out of the side office and walked hurriedly toward him. They surrounded my brother like housecats round a rat. I have no idea what he said but I saw the truck door open, the men stand back, and Arny walk, shoulders hunched, into the prayer hall. A second later he reappeared, kicked off his sandals and went back in. Religion. It’s been a while.
Most temples down here have their resident nun. Nuns in Thailand don’t get nearly the same respect as monks. They cook for and feed the dogs, clean, look after the garden…Wait. This all sounds familiar. No wonder they look so sallow, the lot of them. But it’s that unspoken animosity that makes them more likely to give up top secret information.
I found my nun whitewashing a wall, half her head and one arm.
“Would you like me to just pour the can over you? It’d be quicker,” I said.
My nun smiled. She was in her sixties, I imagined, and she’d probably been a heartbreaker when she was younger. She wasn’t much taller than me but unless she had some spare brushes stuffed down her shirt she’d been much more generously endowed. An old monk draped in a robe was sitting on a step with his back to her. There were barely breathing dog carcasses littered all around like casualties of a major canine battle.
“Some can whitewash,” she said. “Some can repair cars. Of the two, whitewashing is my strongest hand so I suggest you don’t let me anywhere near your engine.”
I liked her. I suppose I could have thrashed around in the small-talk undergrowth for ten minutes and crept up on the subject, or I could just attack. I read her as more of the direct type.
“I heard your abbot got killed,” I said.
“You did?”
She let the fat brush drop to her side where it put another coat on her already white sarong.
“Yup.”
She seemed to be waiting for something.
“So, did he?” I asked.
“Get killed?”
“Yes.”
“Should we ask him?”
“I…?”
The pretty nun turned to the old monk sitting on the step. He appeared to be composing a psalm in the air with his long fingers.
“Jow a wat” she said, the formal address. “This young lady was wondering whether you’d been killed.”
My facts were undoubtedly less than accurate. The abbot wheeled around to look at me. He was weather-beaten like the wreck of a small canoe. His ribcage was an old Chinese abacus whose beads had been long lost, his face a clumsily sketched grid of experiences with pockmarks. Life had apparently had a go at him but he seemed comfortable in his ravaged body.
“No.” He smiled.
“Well, you can’t win them all,” I said.
“Hoping for a dead abbot, were you?” my nun asked, still smiling.
“In a way, yes,” I confessed. “But I’m also very pleased to see that the good father is alive and well.”
“And how would a death improve your quality of life, young lady?” asked the nun. “I watched you breach the security post and jump from a car and sneak up on us. So, I have to assume the news of a killing was important to you in some way.”
You know they’re often characters with shady pasts of their own, no more free from sin than you or I, but there’s something about a figure wrapped in saffron or virgin white that makes you want to tell the truth. So we sat, the three of us, and I gave them the blog version of the saga of my current life. They smiled and nodded along the entire journey, apparently fascinated by my decline. And I arrived at the juncture at which I now stood. And there was an exchange between them. If I’d been distracted by a hornet I might have missed it. And I agree I might very well be wrong, because monks and nuns and imams and Catholic priests are nothing more than little green space aliens in my mind. I’d been far too hip a teenager and too cynical a young thing to be snared by team religion. But I sensed there was a history between these two. I visualized it as a deep crimson pool in which they’d swum together somewhere in their past lives. I believe that brief unspoken look said:
“You tell her.”
“No, you tell her.”
There was a pause during which I heard our truck start, reverse and drive away, but I was too close here to give up and chase after it. The abbot coughed and spoke.
“Two of the men you saw walk out of my office are detectives from Bangkok. One other is a local detective from Lang Suan CID. Then there’s the head of our local council. The monks are attached to the Buddhist Sangba Supreme Council, a branch called the Pra Vinyathikum. If we were police it would be known as Internal Affairs. The reason I am not down there with them, even though this is my temple – my wat – is that I am being investigated. In fact it would appear I am the chief suspect in a murder inquiry.”
Good line.
In fact it was several seconds before I realized my jaw had dropped.
“Whose murder?” I asked.
The nun had taken up a curled, feline pose on the step beneath ours. It made me feel uncomfortable but I wasn’t about to get involved in stage direction. The abbot continued.
“The monks fro
m the Pra Vinyathikum arrived here two days ago with an abbot. His name was Tan Winai. In fact I’d met him many years before. We’d developed a friendship then but had gone our separate ways. But he had been sent here by the council to investigate a complaint – about me. Before he left Bangkok we had spoken on the telephone so I knew he’d be coming. I told him he was welcome. They have the power to disrobe monks, but there is nothing they can do to an abbot apart from put in a report to the RAD: the Religious Affairs Department. The RAD would then conduct an inquiry of its own. So, this was a very initial investigation and none of us thought too seriously about it.”
“So the visiting abbot gave you details of the complaint against you?” I asked.
“He was very open. We discussed the matter at great length.”
“But you weren’t able to talk him out of pursuing the complaint.”
“It was an interesting debate. A very contentious area. One that is not clearly laid out in the Buddhist doctrines. In many respects I could see his side of the matter. I was keen to hear all of the arguments and make my own.”
“And you would have abided by his decision?”
“Of course.”
“What was the complaint?”
Both the abbot and the nun smiled.
“You speak your mind,” the nun said. She got to her feet and put her hand on my arm. It was my signal to walk with her. “You could very well be a southerner.”
That didn’t automatically register as a compliment and I was unhappy about being steered away before my question was answered. But I’d always been uncomfortably aware of rituals and unwritten rites in temples. I seemed to be the only one who didn’t know all the secrets. As children, Mair had hurried us in and out of ceremonies as if some spell might infect us if we lingered too long. Consequently I always felt like a foreigner with only a basic grasp of the language.
“So?” I pushed.
We were behind the half-painted wall. The nun’s voice dropped to a hush no louder than the swish of her robe.
“Abbot Kem here was accused by one of his flock of fornication,” she said.
I looked at her and took a stab.
“With you?”
“Yes.”
Nuns and monks and fornication. Is it any wonder I avoided it all? When I was at primary school we learned the golden rules by rote. None of them came to mind right now but…abbots sleeping with nuns didn’t seem to be OK.
“And did you?” I asked. “Did he?”
“No.”
“But you used to have…something.”
“We have known each other for many years,” said the nun. “We cared for each other. Before all this, before religion overwhelmed us, we had the most beautiful and pure friendship two people could ever know. We were, and remain, as close as any two creatures on this earth. We saw through one another’s eyes, breathed the same breaths.”
Perhaps I was being a bit dumb here and this probably wasn’t the right time to ask about sex, but it was all relevant.
“So even with all that eye sharing and co-breathing, it was still platonic?”
“Yes.”
“And you had this really nice connection but nothing came of it and you went your own ways and found religion?” I hoped I wasn’t being cynical.
“Yes.”
“And by chance, even though there are forty thousand wats in Thailand, by some quirk of fate, you ended up here together.”
She smiled again. “Of course not. We have always been in touch: letters, phone calls. We are like family. We have a connection. I think we always knew that we’d end up at the same place. Abbot Kem told me about the simple beauty of this region and I decided to move from the northeast.”
OK, the millionaire question. No friends to phone. No help from the audience.
“Are you still in love?” I asked.
The nun sighed deeply, then switched over to profound mode. She sandwiched her hands together in front of her lap and spoke to her toes. It felt rehearsed.
“When you understand the dharma,” she said, “all love and hate is absorbed into a greater appreciation of the universe. Personal likes and dislikes are irrelevant. You are no longer an individual. You are a part of the whole.”
Good speech. I didn’t believe her. I was annoyed not to have the abbot’s view of events. I needed to look into his eyes and see what his slant on all this was. For all I knew, this could all have been the nun’s personal fantasy. But somehow I doubted it.
“So, you don’t love each other anymore?” I asked.
I was probably sinning like hell by forcing a nun to answer personal questions about her love life, but I had a murder inquiry on my hands – at last. Thank God I wasn’t shackled by any of those guilt trips that are such a lovely feature of organized religion.
“My love encompasses all,” she said.
All right. Technically I’m a Buddhist. It’s written there on my ID card. But I was brought up as a sort of warped realist. My mother threw me into this modern world where I was supposed to make friends with technology and alien cultures. And although part of me believes there’s a higher plane where jogging and Big Brother Thailand and Bon Jovi aren’t important, I find it really hard to believe skinny old Abbot Kem had ever stopped loving the warmest nun on the planet. But was she worth killing the IA abbot for? I’d like to see Raymond Chandler get his chops around that one.
With the detectives and the IA monks back in the office detecting and my brother and his truck nowhere to be seen, I took the opportunity to visit the scene of the crime. The live abbot, Kem, was confined to the temple grounds but not to his quarters so he walked with me along the concrete path to the spot where the dead abbot, Winai, was found. A lethargic procession of temple dogs trailed along behind us. I attempted to push him on the relationship issue but he was mute on the subject. Not surprisingly, the body was no longer ahead of us on the path, but a large section of concrete had been stained a chewed-tobacco brown.
“Lot of blood,” I said.
“He was stabbed several times in the stomach,” Abbot Kem said.
I looked around. It wasn’t a secluded spot at all. I could see the road clearly down the hill with our truck pulled up beside it. To the north, anyone visiting the prayer hall, the monks, the nun, all of them had a clear view of where we now stood. And at our backs, the bright bank of bougainvilleas in full bloom reared up like an advertising hoarding declaring: MURDER OF THE DAY.
“Who found the body?” I asked.
“I did.”
“What time?”
“Just after three yesterday afternoon.”
“What made you come up here?”
“The dogs. There was a lot of commotion. They’re normally asleep around that time when the air’s at its driest. I was afraid they’d come across a cobra. When I got here I found the abbot dead on the path.”
“You came all this way because of a snake? Are you a snake charmer, Abbot?”
“Most of the snakes up here are harmless but we lose a lot of the dogs to cobra bites. The snakes only bite in self-defense so it’s often merely a question of refereeing. I have a cane basket. I get between the dogs and plonk it upside down on top of the snake and sit on it. When the dogs get bored and go home, I release the snake.”
“So, in fact, you’re rescuing the snake?”
“In a way, yes.”
I’d heard some wild witness statements in my time but that was a good one. However, unless any of the snakes were prepared to give evidence, it didn’t do a thing for Abbot Kem. I thanked him and watched him stroll back along the path, stopping here to pick up broken branches, there to pluck a dead leaf from a plant. As I walked down to the truck, I considered the variables. One resounding question that stuck in my mind was: Would a man who valued life enough to step between a pack of dogs and a cobra be able to kill another human being? But, I’d seen stranger things.
♦
“How did you manage to talk your way past all those policemen?” I
asked Arny as I climbed into the truck.
“I didn’t have to.”
“You must have said som – Oh, you were anxious, weren’t you?” He nodded. “And when you’re anxious your eyes water.” He nodded again. “And they thought you were crying and in desperate need to pray.”
“It was stressful,” he confessed.
I could picture the scene. Arny steps out of the truck. He’s surrounded. He panics. The detectives decide the only reason a one-hundred-kilogram brick barn would burst into tears is if he’s in desperate need of salvation. See? I knew there was a reason to bring Arny along. I climbed up his left side and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He liked it.
Four
“Information is moving. You know, nightly news is one way, of course, but it’s also moving through the blogosphere and through the Internets.”
—GEORGE W. BUSH, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 2, 2007
Two or three nights a week I’d phone Sissi in Chiang Mai or she’d phone me. We’re probably as close as two siblings who have nothing in common can be. I love her but I keep expecting that phone call where she says, “Jimm, I’ve decided you’re only pretending to like me so I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” That would bring her close-friend count down to exactly zero. To explain her temperament I’d need to go back a ways with this story.
When I was growing up it took me a while to realize that boys and girls were different. I’m not talking anatomically here, I mean, my brother Somkiet and I were one creature, and it was decidedly pink. We co-wore all my clothes but never his. We giggled and slapped a great deal. We had dolls and we spent an awfully long time looking at me in the shower. Mair started off angry. “You take off that nightie at once, mister, and clean your football boots.”
Granddad Jah bought him boxing gloves and enrolled him in the local gym. But over the years I felt a gradual decline in their resolve to divert Somkiet from the flowery path he skipped along. In fact it was Mair who gave him the final push.
At sixteen, Somkiet was at that crossroads we hear so much about and was in desperate need of good advice, preferably from a father figure. But all he got at home was Granny preparing herself for nirvana, Granddad Jah moping about his lack of advancement through the ranks of the police force, and me, hopelessly in love with Liu De Hua, the Hong Kong TV star. Nothing seemed as important to me as Liu. Even I had abandoned Somkiet. Once she’d given up her happy life, Mair waded through several years of depression. She lived like Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. Her world started at the pavement in front of our shop and ended at the spirit house at the back fence. We weren’t much of a support group for a girl in a boy’s skin.
Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat Page 6
