Butterfly Stories Part 23

The almost empty train pulsed open-windowed past fishy-smelling palm fields, fat lady vendeuses singsonging up and down the aisle with c.o.ke, dried fish, satay, rice ... He bought an orange peac.o.c.k's fan of chicken that was wired between two halves of a bamboo stick. It was very fresh and gingery and good.

8.

The silver-blue backs of metaled houses formed a plain interrupted by shadow-crevices, a ca.n.a.l, an occasional tall palm . . . then these ended suddenly in gra.s.s as high as the window. A silver-fogged river flashed on him like relapsing fever. Silver fog lived on the gra.s.sheads like an aura. He saw a woman with four gold rings on her finger; she pressed her hand to her nose, looking in the window at him, and then the train was past. Bushy islands undercut by silver water-ribbons gave way to housecubes open and shuttered, grey walls. The train breasted the walled river of gra.s.s . . .

9.

Again they pa.s.sed another train, through whose windows he saw other heads and then windows, cutout palm foliage. Trains seemed to him like destinies. He wondered what kind of person he'd be becoming if he were on that other train.

10.

The conductor approached in his olive-green uniform, a pad of mysterious forms under his arm like birth control calendars. He punched four and gave them to Vanna's husband. He put a pen in his mouth when he punched them. The golden star and double arrowhead on his shoulder, the golden medallion on his lapel, the grand golden lozenge-emblem just above the slick black visor of his cap, these tokens gave indisputable proof of his majesty. He leaned against the seat, almost erect, writing, saying something with a gentle smile, the long tendons vibrating in his arms. His pockmarked face was lowered, his pants creased to fresh knife-edges. After he was gone, all the pa.s.sengers had to explain to one another the various forms he'd a.s.signed them. Suddenly, Vanna's husband remembered a maxim he'd heard: In Cambodia you can give every official a gift; in fact, you'd better give every official a gift; in Thailand you'd better not give them a gift unless you know them.

11.

At midday the train stopped for an hour. He went out and sat under the platform canopy, staring at a giant yellow Buddha whose topknot was just a little higher than the highest tree. Two skinny old monks, their once orange robes brown, leaned forward on a bench, patiently. There was a stand with gla.s.s-fronted triple shelves on narrow legs, puffed full of white b.a.l.l.s with something red hiding inside. - He thought: I wonder if that's how my b.a.l.l.s are now, with AIDS inside them . . .

12.

Now they rattled through the heart of Thailand, plains of yellow-green, wet rice fields steaming like c.u.n.ts, the underside of another green tree, white birds on the narrow rivers, a horizon-line of grey-green trees. The bridges were all grand (in Cambodia, each one having been meticulously blown up by the Khmer Rouge, the Hun Sen government rebuilt the only way it could, just twin metal tracks on the rusty trestles, good enough for military vehicles, the river waiting in between, so don't wobble right or left; and every bridge was guarded by soldiers); they were all painted, window-high; no soldiers stood there looking down on green rice-stubble in water . . . But in the middle of a rice field he saw a stick-bridge with its sticks projecting like crazy darning needles.

Yotaka. The flagman held out the dark green banner to send the train on; the red cloth hung sleepy in his other hand.

Vanna's husband gave a kid one of his apricot cookies, and the kid prayed thank you. His mother kept her money between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She had to reach up there to pay the conductor.

Prachinari. The rice fields ended, and then there was jungle with mountains ahead, and that Cambodian sandalwood smell. Sometimes they came out again into rice-lakes, but those were now bayed by trees and mountains. Houses stood on stilts among the big tree-ferns; and between the houses' legs lived colonies of birds in baskets.

Aranyaprathet. Last stop. All day the fan had been slowly dipping and turning overhead; now it went off and Vanna's husband felt his stomach begin to coil . . .

13.

He pa.s.sed an open-doored place that said COFFEE SHOP - RESTAURANT and inside it was all girls kneeling before a smoking Buddha; all the chairs faced Buddha, and beyond Buddha was only the bar. The owner had died. It would be closed for nine days.

14.

He thought: Aside from this, what do I have left to accomplish? - Nothing, really. I don't care if I never screw another wh.o.r.e.

He thought: Crossing the border isn't really worth it.

He thought: The reality is that these trips are getting harder for me physically, emotionally, morally and maybe mentally. There is nothing out here that I really want.

15.

He thought: How many of my sweaty twilights has G.o.d seen?

16.

He remembered how one night he'd sat up in bed beside her, kissed the medallion of Catherine Tekakwitha which he wore on the homemade loop of parachute cord now stained greyish-green by years of feversweat and sleepwax and the fumes of happiness, and he prayed for Vanna. She was watching him. For the first time he slipped the medallion off. Then he hung it round her neck. After that, he gave her the medallion every night, and in the morning she gave it back to him. On their last night he kissed it and gave it to her to keep, and she confided to him her own most precious thing, a snapshot of her baby . . .

17.

Far away on a sidewalk corner, a boy bounced a ball. He was many zones of light away. That sidewalk might as well be the whole empty world. Dresses hung in an open bay of light. A yellow traffic light opened and closed like a mouth. People were sitting at sidewalk tables by a parked wheel-stand that sold nothing. Their bent backs gave off aquarium colors as they ate.

18.

You want to cross the border with Khmer Rouge? But that is illegal; that is very dangerous!

Well, he told the translator, it's all Esquire's fault. Esquire said I had to. Otherwise, I'll lose my job.

I know some people without legs, said the translator. Because they try to cross the border. Why you want to do that?

Oh, to meet the Khmer Rouge - The translator laughed incredulously.

Staring into the square black stagnant pool in the center of town (a squiggly white-cube reflection weighing down one corner of it), he tried to screw up his courage to ask a cyclo to take him to the border. The translator had said that they had checkpoints on the road at night. It was all so pointless, and so much effort, and nothing but a nightmare to reward him at the end of it, if he got anywhere at all. Why didn't he just drown himself in that filthy pool? - He felt very much alone. Outside the fence, the cyclo drivers sat in their vehicles in a row. The lighted markets with their piles of red and yellow fruit seemed to balance the leaves that hung over him like some scaly underbelly of the night. A barefoot boy pa.s.sed through the tube of green light that spilled on the street. He was carrying a basket. Vanna's husband felt sad.

The man gladly accepted fifty bhat. On this kind of cyclo the driver sat ahead, towing the pa.s.senger in the wheeled booth. Seeing those st.u.r.dy brown legs pedaling him into the palmtree darkness, Vanna's husband felt inexpressibly lonely and sad. The man pedaled him down back ways, smoking a cigarette as he went. No one else was on the road. He saw people eating inside, and they were laughing loudly at something that one of them had done or said. On the sidewalk he pa.s.sed three children, a boy and two girls. The boy gripped one of the girls' knees.

On the main road Vanna's husband kept his head down every time a car or motorbike pa.s.sed. The sound of crickets and the smell of hemp were overpowering. The man pedaled on very slowly and serenely, like a distance swimmer. After a short time they reached the first bridge.

Ahead were white and red lights (very still and bright).

The lights were getting closer now and he wondered if that was when the trouble would start. They were very still and steady.

So they came to that first checkpoint, a triangle of incandescent tubes in the road, swarming with insects. A giant beetle crawled slowly up one of the bulbs, seeking something it would never find or understand. Then it slid to the ground.

There were three Thai policemen. They turned Vanna's husband back, and he beamed like an idiot and went. But he'd noticed that the car and motorbike drivers did not stop at that first checkpoint unless they wanted to. On his next attempt he'd lie down in the back of a car.

A firefly winked low in the gra.s.s. A motorbike shot by. A reflected light shone upon another stagnant pool.

In the car he made it to the second checkpoint before they were stopped. The soldiers returned him to the first checkpoint, and this time the three policemen shouted and shook him. Again he grinned as stupidly as he could. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, they did not arrest him or take his pa.s.sport. After they had driven him back to town he sat trying to decide what to do. He could walk (it was only six kilometers) but what then? If he evaded the glares of checkpoint light, if he succeeded in clambering over the rolls of barbed wire at the end, then he'd be in a jungle filled with land mines. The best thing that could happen to him would be losing a leg -

19.

There she was in the dimdark hotel room sitting side-saddle on the bed with one arm resting on his back while she touched her widely smiling mouth (though it was not exactly a smile since her eyes didn't change; it was just sweet and incomprehensible) with her forefinger - a pose she must have considered endearing or photogenic, since she did it all the time for the photographer; her husband didn't remember her doing it much for him; perhaps it was a trick she'd learned from some actress; anyway, she lounged in her waspdark-and-goldstriped dress, her elbows bent like wings, her face a little elongated by her "smile" in the mysterious blue air-conditioned quiet of the hotel darkness, no one able to see them because he or she had closed the shutters; her hand patted him very softly through the towel that entubed his waist; that was all he had on; he lay resting so beautifully, resting, happy with her weight on top of him, her b.u.t.t against his side; he patted it; he wanted her to take her shower and lie down next to him so that he could hold her very tight and sleep (did she sleep when he slept or did she just lie there patient and close-eyed? he'd never wondered that before). He lay down and slept for an hour. Then he went out to try again.

20.

This time he went on foot, ducking down into the feculent ditch whenever he saw or heard a vehicle. He neared the checkpoint of incandescent lights and veered left, crawling slowly. When he was even with the checkpoint, the white brightness grabbed and blinded him even as he tried to inch away from being seen. They did not see him. He felt a cold itch between his shoulderblades until he was in the darkness again. He waited for his sight to come back. Then he crawled for a long time. Vines cut tensely across his vision. The moss felt like a wet dog's sides. Already the bugs were crawling over him. He glanced back at the checkpoint and was shocked by its h.e.l.lish brightness and proximity. Suddenly the soldiers began talking in agitated voices. He flung himself down onto his belly. There was a splash. His heart was pounding so fiercely that he thought he might vomit. Something soft and cold crawled across his neck in a series of rapid spasms. He lay very still until the talking stopped, and then he waited some more, until at last he heard a truck grinding loudly toward him from the town. That noise would surely cover him as well as any mask of leaves. He began to worm his way closer to Cambodia. When the truck drew abreast of him, he lay down again. Silent mosquitoes bit his face and neck. His chest ached from his heartbeat. He pa.s.sed the second checkpoint, glimpsing in its outreach of alarm-glare many giant brown leathery leaf-cups like radar ears hanging dead in the dripping shadows, listening to life, and then that choice of surrender too was behind him, and there was only one more. It would be dawn soon. The mosquitoes were not so thick now. He began to allow himself hope that after all he'd be fully embraced by the jungle body. The darkness was bleeding in the east by the time he reached the place where the road turned left to the cleared zone where they had an open-air border market in the mornings and early afternoons, and it was bleak and far too bright but the soldiers were busy bellying themselves into prost.i.tute-laughs. The lanes of barbed wire made him despair for a moment, but he followed the nearest wall, going away from the soldiers and the light, and after a half-mile there was jungle instead of packed-down dirt, and at dawn the barbed wire wavered, pressed heavily by brown limbs and creepers, and so he found a hole; he knew from the Pat Pong girls that there'd always be a hole if he wanted one badly enough . . .

21.

Skinny boys were shouting at him. They tied his wrists behind his back with wire. - Are you imperialist lackey of traitor? a boy shouted. - Yes, he beamed. I am a traitor.

They were very happy then. They'd finally found someone who was guilty.

They led him along the edge of a luminous brownish-green creek that smelled like muck. A huge crab dandled its claws in the middle, clutching at unripe twigs. It was not a beetle-shaped crab like the ones in the markets, but broad, flat and brown. Leaves and garbage were everywhere. The view vanished into stinking greenness. The trees were not especially tall or leafy, but they were everywhere. Weird structures of roots and intersecting vines like musical instruments played chords upon his heart. They led him through turnstiles of latticework roots the hue of ginger-bulbs, and it got darker and so did the stench of the creek. There was another crab, even bigger than the last, and it was eating someone's face half-sunk in the reddish-brown ooze. There was a crowd of toiling crabs, and then more barbed wire and they were there where they were supposed to be. She was looking on him full at last with that sweet soft pale smooth delicate face of hers, open and trusting, smiling - really smiling! - a pouty little smile like a kiss, her gold chain necklace coming shooting out of chin-shadow with the heart lying on her thin bluish-white blouse just above her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, inverted-V eyebrows seeming to question him a little as she smiled; the recognition of him took up her whole face as she sat waiting for him with that sad smile; he was hers; soon he'd be sleeping beside her forever.

Epigraphs and Sources

The b.u.t.terfly Boy

Epigraph - G. W. Leibniz, preface to The New Essays (1703-5) in Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Arlew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Publis.h.i.+ng Company, 1989), p. 293.