Colin Cotterill - Thirty-Three Teeth

Here was where they had sighted the bear. That was Monday, just before midnight. He looked across the yard, beyond the stupa to the road. And on the far side of that road was his own lane.

This was the second thing that worried him. The bear had come to him in his sleep early that morning. But if the bear had actually materialized as a spirit, it had to be dead. That was logical. So why had nobody found its body? And if it wasn’t dead, that meant the foul-breathed creature that woke him had been alive and still dripping with the blood of its victim.

He turned off his engine twenty meters from his house and wheeled the bike into his front yard, but Miss Vong still caught him. She had to shout to be heard above the loudspeaker booming from the corner of the street. It was detailing how long to soak jackfruit skins to make the best hair conditioner.

“Good evening, Comrade Doctor. Hot, isn’t it? I’ve just made some nice taro gruel.”

“Good for you, Miss Vong.”

“I’ll bring you some over.”

“No, thank you.”

“Yes, I will. You have a shower and I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He was about to make an excuse but her head was already back inside her gate. She was a thoroughly annoying woman, spindly and plain as a hand-rolled cigarette. She’d been his neighbor in town before the apartment house they had lived in blew up, and the planning department assumed they’d want to be close in their new allocation. Thankfully, her work at the Education Department kept her out of Siri’s hair for long periods.

He stood in front of his own gate and looked at the larger, far more beautiful house of his other neighbor, who was a government cadre from Oudom Xay. The man’s silent children were riding in the street on their brand-new bicycles. Scotch whiskey cartons and a stereo packing case had been stacked beside the dustbins for a month so everyone could see just how proudly corrupt the man was.

Siri wondered what huge favor was being repaid to this smalltown headman from the north who sat on a rocking chair on his porch every evening cleaning a pistol. He ignored all his neighbors, just as he seemed to take no interest in his own family. If he worked, he did so in the hours when Siri was sleeping.

Saloop barked a welcome from forty meters down the lane and plodded happily toward home. Siri watched his belly swing from side to side and wondered where he was getting fed. The bucket of rice and scraps Siri left out in the morning was invariably untouched by evening.

“Welcome home, brave housedog.”

Saloop stretched up for a headrub.

“You realize the house could have been broken into while you were off doing whatever it is you do?”

In fact, that wasn’t true. No breaking would have been necessary. With all known criminals under lock and key on the islands in Nam Ngum Reservoir, few people bothered to lock their doors now. To be honest, Siri didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

He removed a mysterious object from his motorbike and carried it into the house. It was wrapped and taped in a blanket. Saloop followed curiously, wagging his tail. The doctor lit a lamp and took his secret all the way through to his yard to a grave he’d pre-dug for it. He’d estimated the length almost perfectly. In that far corner of the garden, in a spot hidden from prying eyes, he buried the blanket and what it contained.

He was brushing the earth from his trousers when he noticed the corrugated fence. It separated his home from one that was under construction at the back. Eventually they’d get around to building a wall. When the workers had put up this fence, it had been nailed firmly to four bamboo posts that marked the edge of his plot. It was eight feet tall and had probably been a temporary border to many homes before this.

But it was no longer fixed. At his end, it hung from one single tack and was slightly buckled, as if someone had leaned heavily against it and popped out the nails.

He lifted the flap, held up his lamp, and looked at the slow progress of the foundations there. He saw the piles of sand, still where they’d been when he moved in. But there was something curious about the nearest pile. He went through the gap and knelt down to get a better look.

There were footprints-two clear ones-which were neither human nor dog. Both were pointing in his direction. A shudder crept up his spine. Could it really have been the killer bear in the living flesh that had woken him that morning?

If so, why was Siri still alive?

"Civilai? It’s Siri.”

“Siri? You’re using a telephone. Next thing they know, you’ll be-”

“Right. But no time for sarcasm just now.”

“Oh? Okay. What do you want?”

“I need an animal expert.”

“Any particular breed?”

“Bears.”

“You never fail to astound me, Dr. S. I’ll ask around.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh. And I think I’ve got something on your mysterious chest at the DSIC.”

“Excellent. You can tell me all about it at lunch.”

Siri put down the receiver, thanked the hospital clerk, and walked back to the morgue. But even though there was a lot to be learned from Civilai that day, Siri wasn’t going to be able to make lunch. In fact, although he didn’t know it yet, he wasn’t even going to be in Vientiane.

The sand had been packed quite tightly at the construction site, but the cement Siri mixed the night before had still spread a good deal. He and Dtui sat at his desk comparing the concrete cast with the agar scratch marks. They measured the separation between the claws. It wasn’t identical but the difference wasn’t great enough to preclude them coming from the same creature.

“Dtui, if it was the bear that ripped Auntie See apart, that same bear came to visit me on Tuesday.”

“Wow. You saw it?”

“I thought it was a dream. But dreams don’t pull down fences and leave footprints.”

“How come you’re still alive?”

“That’s a good question.”

“And one you’ll have to wait for an answer to.”

Siri and Dtui both looked up to see where the whiny voice had come from. In the doorway, a thin, well-dressed man in his early thirties stood with his hands on his hips. The hot weather had inflamed his acne to the point that it seemed to glow on his cheeks.

“Goodness, Judge Haeng. What an honor.” Siri smiled.

Dtui made the man a polite nop with her palms tightly together. “Good health, Comrade Judge.”

The man responded to neither the nop nor the words. He sat at Dtui’s desk and fanned himself in exaggerated fashion with the papers he carried.

“Hot, isn’t it?” she tried again, but he ignored her.

“If I could trust any of the fools in my office not to run off and go shopping before they brought you a message, I wouldn’t have to be here myself. But this is an emergency, and it has been entrusted to me.”

Mr. Geung had seen the judge arrive and had gone for a glass of cool ice water from the canteen. It was one of the services he happily provided. When he got back, he put it down in front of the ruddy man and looked at his blemished skin as he said “Good h … h … health, Com … Comr …”

“Heaven help us. Does he ever get to the end of a sentence?”

“He’s overwhelmed by your omnipotence.” Siri smiled again.

“I’m not about to consume any liquids in this place, am I? Tell him to take this away.”

“He speaks Lao quite well.”

“I’m sure he does, eventually. Take it away.” He despaired of the fact that Geung ignored him and stood his ground, just as he despaired because his department was hiring a mongoloid when they had the budget for a “normal” person. But Siri was unshakable. He said the day Geung left, he’d follow.