Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

His girlfriend, Nhia, whispered something in his ear and he pushed her gently away.

“I am not. I am not drunk,” he said, waving his arm around in front of him like the trunk of a mad elephant. “And if I am drunk it’s only because I’m in the presence of the great Yeh Ming, and because my sweet wife”-he raised his cup to her and dropped it on his lap-”is dead and smelling like a rotten foot too long in a boot. And because I have to walk a million mountains to another place that doesn’t want me.”

“Where are you going?” Siri asked, hoping to get a few more snippets of information before the old man collapsed, but it was too late. Long buried his head in Nhia’s bosom and sobbed.

“To America,” Bao told him.

“You’re walking to America?”

“Only as far as the anarchists across the Mekhong,”

Chia said. “They say it’s easy from there. ‘Look hungry and helpless, say you worship the big American chief, say you hate communists.’ And there you are in a rocket flying to the other side of the earth. Never have to work again.”

“Or live. Or be yourself,” said Long, emerging briefly from his bosom.

Nhia pulled his head back to her soft chest and continued to whisper in his ear. It was a sad moment. Siri looked down at his plate. It was piled high as the sacred mountain at Phu Bia with pork and chicken. His glass was filled to overflowing. A woman on each side of him had hold of a thigh as if they were about to make a wish and split him in two. And suddenly he was afraid.

For whatever reason, these people, these fine friendly people, had gone to a great deal of trouble to bring him here and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to help them. He wasn’t a shaman. He didn’t know the rituals or the rites. He couldn’t bring them peace or happiness before they set off on their big walk. After seventy-three years he’d barely brought peace and happiness to himself. He knew he was going to disappoint them and, all of a sudden, he felt like a charlatan. Guilt sobered him. He politely removed the hands from his thighs, nodded at the still-full banquet mat, and got unsteadily to his feet. Long seemed to be asleep on the pillow of his girlfriend’s chest.

Siri walked to the doorway, removed his nose plugs, and breathed in the fresh cold mountain air. The moon hung over the village puffing out its cheeks and varnishing the hilltops all the way to Vietnam with a warm yellow glow. Nobody should ever have to leave such a beautiful place.

“The latrine’s over there.”

Siri turned to see General Bao pointing toward a dark fence. It stood out as if some celestial dressmaker had cut a rectangle from the hem of the star-filled sky. Emptying his bladder hadn’t been the reason for his exit but contact with the chill air suddenly made it feel like a good idea. He negotiated a seemingly bottomless pit designed for people with unnaturally wide stances, did his business, and returned to find Bao still standing there.

“Would you like to see the shaman’s house?” she asked.

“You had a shaman here? What happened to him?”

They walked together across the moonlit village compound.

“They called it ‘fire from a friend.’ This village was in a Vang Pao area. It was clearly marked on the maps. We were American. But sometimes the Lao who flew the American planes were afraid to get too close to the PL antiaircraft guns. If it was a Hmong pilot there was no problem. The Hmong are fearless. But the Lao Royalists, sometimes they got confused. They dropped their bombs any old where so they didn’t have to go back to the air base at Long Chen still carrying them. There’s a lot of empty land out here. Dropping a bomb usually doesn’t hurt anyone but the plants and the animals. And the plants and the animals are used to getting hurt. Our shaman, Neng, had never wanted to be a shaman. You know how it works.”

They arrived at the furthest house and Bao produced a ring of keys from her belt. She tried them one by one in the lock.

“You don’t opt to be a shaman,” she went on. “You get sick one time with an illness you can’t fix with medicine. And you have a choice. You die or you become a shaman. A learned man came from another village and gave him the ultimatum. Neng wasn’t in a hurry to die so he went for the second choice. Who wouldn’t? He’d been a good silver worker before, but suddenly he had to spend all his time with the ills and craziness of the village. We all loved him, actually. He was good at it. Neng wasn’t just playing the part. He took it seriously. He used his common sense to fix small problems, not wanting to bother the spirits for minor matters. But when it came to sickness and deep troubles of the heart and soul, he was really in control. He studied hard with his shaman master so he could be the best at what he did.”

The lock found a key that pleased it and the padlock sprang open.

“Then one day he went down to the valley to collect herbs and he was blown to bits by our side. I mean, you have to really upset some god for that to happen, don’t you think? All that land. All those hills. One little man, but ‘boom.’’’

The chain dropped onto the earth where Bao’s tears had already dampened the dust.

“You were close to him,” Siri said.

“He was my father.”

Siri put his arm around her shoulder and let some of her sadness soak into him. The door to the house swung inward.

“We should have brought a lamp with us,” Siri said.

“No worries, Yeh Ming.” She reached inside the door. “This village has more Zippos than any other in Laos.”

Her hand returned, holding a colorful lighter that sported the image of a buxom girl in a bikini.

“America Number One,” she said in English, and walked into the house. It smelled of incense and rotten fruit. Siri followed her.

“When was the last time you were here?” he asked.

“Me? The day Father went to all the points of the compass.”

“And your mother?”

“She died giving birth to me.”

The Zippo lit a radius of four yards and Siri knew it had to be getting hot in Bao’s hand. But she appeared to have a set destination so he followed the halo to the far side of the house. They arrived at an altar. Bao’s father had gone to a lot of trouble to make it the most elaborate Siri had ever seen. It consisted of three wooden tiers. On the bottom shelf was a silver bowl containing water. Several unspun cotton threads looped from it up to the crossbeam of the house. There were handmade flowers attached to the frame and several horns of various sizes. A string of pig jaws hung from the overhead. There were three porcelain bowls of uneaten offerings on the second shelf and a solitary incense stick burning slowly.

“Someone’s been here,” Siri said.

“Long! He comes every morning to worship… that.”

On the top tier of the altar in the place of honor was a child’s toy. Hundreds of white strings led off from it like calcified veins. Spirit money was attached to it here and there and the wax of pig-fat candles clogged its frame. It was so totally incongruous it took Siri a while to identify it. Most Lao would never have seen such a thing but Siri had spent time overseas. The French called them йchasses а ressort and it was probably the last thing one would expect to see in a Hmong village in the remote hills of Xiang Khouang, give or take, perhaps, a lawn mower.

“You know what it is?” she asked. She took three more incense sticks from a box and started to light them in the flame of the Zippo.

“Actually I do,” he told her. “A pogo stick. How did it get here?”

“Shh, Yeh Ming. Not here.”

She lit a candle, placed the incense in a jam jar in front of the toy, and pressed her palms together in supplication. Siri wasn’t about to join her.