Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

They rushed him back to his hut and Siri performed a tried and tested form of bush stomach pumping involving a length of hose and a football bladder. He hoped it would have the desired effect but, by then, he was so exhausted he didn’t really care. If Haeng was so intent on killing himself, who was Siri to intervene? The judge’s black gloves brought a smile to Siri’s face before he returned to the shaman’s hut. The cacophony of sound from the old house on the hilltop had ceased but the sky all around was dirty with its ghost. He was pleased it was all over but he needed sleep. This day seemed to have been endless, so full of lies and deceit he barely deserved to wake up. He crawled onto the bamboo platform and his battered bones clacked as they settled. The last image that burned itself on his pupils was of the sun still squeezing through the bamboo slats. After all he’d been through that day, how could it not be night?

It was truly night when he awoke to feel the knife blade at his neck. The pig-fat candle burned on the altar but there was no other light. The shadow of his attacker loomed black against the candlelight.

“Had enough sleep?” He heard and smelled the sweet earthiness of rice wine.

“Are you really planning to cut my throat?” he asked. “After all I’ve been through?”

“I might.”

“And what’s my crime?” He was barely awake and still heavy with exhaustion.

“Lying.”

“You’re drunk.”

“And why shouldn’t I be?” Bao asked. Even though her knife rode his Adam’s apple, her young breasts were pressed against his arm as she lay beside him. He could feel her breaths, heavy and fast as a boxer’s at the bell. “Everything I know and love will be gone in the morning.”

“For goodness’ sake, take that blade away. You might do some damage.”

“I intend to. It’s my plan to cut out your lying tongue, great Yeh Ming.” She sighed and rolled onto her back. The knife went with her. Siri sidled away and propped himself up on one elbow.

“You’re going in the morning?”

“Everything’s done here so we’ll join the big march tomorrow. Tonight’s our farewell party. I’ve been sent to wake you and drag you to it.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Not yet. First I have to…”

“Cut out my tongue. I know. But I can’t imagine why you’d want to.”

“Don’t!” The knife returned and this time there might have been a slight nick. She was very drunk and the words left her mouth angrily and badly pronounced. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’ve had too much-”

She sat up and stabbed the knife into the sleeping platform. Its blade reflected the flicker of the candle.

“I know I’m drunk. It’s temporary. So don’t talk to me like one of the addicts behind the Phonsavan market. Tomorrow I’ll be sober but I won’t recover from your humiliation if you keep lying to me. I need to know what happened up there, and don’t give me the demon… unspoken… cremation shit. Show me some respect.”

Siri saw the fire in her beautiful eyes and fell deeply in love with her. He swung his legs off the platform and felt the pain of his splinter wounds. He sat for a moment staring at the ground. She remained silent beside him.

“If I tell you,” he said, “you have to swear to me on the souls of your ancestors that you won’t tell Elder Long or the others. And I mean now and forever.”

“Is it so terrible?”

“Promise!”

“All right.”

“Say the words.”

“I swear not to tell.” She pulled her legs under her and sat cross-legged on the platform.

Siri chose to stand to tell his tale, prancing back and forth.

“I’m a cynic,” he began, “albeit a cynic who is constantly confounded by the truth. I have to be convinced before I believe. When a man tells me in theory it’s possible to examine the genetic makeup of blood to identify a killer, I ask to see it in practice so I can believe it. That’s why I shall never become a better surgeon while I’m stuck in this country. When a man tells me the world will improve if everyone works together and shares its wealth, I may appreciate the theory but I expect evidence, some proof that man is capable of such selflessness. That’s why I’m such a poor communist.

“So when I’m told a demon has assaulted a village girl I need to see evidence that such a thing is possible. Getting zapped in the front yard was quite convincing and the fact that she carried a baby the size of a small buffalo was impressive. But I have to eliminate the other possibilities and be left with only one, that she was impregnated by a demon. I consider how else these feats could be arrived at.

“My biggest problem as a practicing cynic, however, is that I’m aligned, against my will and better judgment, to another world. I’m connected to a world of spirits and souls and gods and no matter how hard I try to disprove this world, I know it exists. I don’t know how it’s possible, but, damn it, it’s there. So I resort to the rules of the supernatural. I begin by seeing whether the incredible can be explained through their rules. And when that world tells me something is off-kilter and implausible, I know I have to think as a human. I have to use logic. My visit to the Otherworld told me I had to look for earthly solutions to this mystery.

“The only reason I didn’t fathom what really happened to me was that we’re in the middle of nowhere in a village without power. But it should have been obvious when I saw the burn marks and bruises. I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could get a generator all the way up here or have the wherewithal to set up a system. But I recalled hearing a roar from the house and I wondered whether that might have been a generator sound. And the possibility that this was some elaborate trick entered my mind. If that was so, Chamee had to be a party to it. What I got when I walked to the haunted house wasn’t a bolt from the blue, it was an electric shock. The reading of the horns should have told me, the positive and negative charges. Do you know much about electricity?”

“Only what I’ve seen in the city. Not enough.”

Siri’s meanderings were now taking him in wide circles around Bao. The breeze from his body fanned the candle every time he passed.

“Well, I asked myself how a young village girl would have the knowledge and access to equipment to be able to set this up. I hypothesized that she had to have an accomplice. Who, I wondered, would know about electronics and mechanics?”

“A soldier,” Bao filled in.

“Right. And why would a soldier be secretly holed up in a house, afraid to be seen? And why would Chamee go along with it?”

Siri gave Bao a few seconds to consider this.

“A deserter,” she said at last, “and a lover. One of our own who had come home on leave one time.”

“And?”

“And made her pregnant.”

The turning over of Bao’s mind had cleared her whiskied head. She was fully alert now and able to join in Siri’s logic.

“But no, Yeh Ming. There isn’t shame in that,” she said. “Our young people aren’t discouraged from having sex, and accidents happen.”

Siri stopped his pacing and waited for her to arrive at the same conclusion he’d reached. She talked it through with herself.

“Why should they go to so much trouble to hide the truth?” she asked herself. “What could have possibly forced them to set up such a complicated lie? Unless…”

“Yes!”

“Oh my lord. They share a family name. They’re from the same clan.”

She had hit the nail squarely on the head. The ultimate Hmong taboo. Two people of the same surname could not have carnal knowledge. Even if they knew of no living family connections, that tie, traced all the way back through the legends to the beginning of time, still barred intimacy within the same bloodline. It was a rule as rigid as if the couple were full brother and sister and it carried the same stigma that such a relationship would hold in the West. Any couple who ignored this taboo and their children after them would be despised and ostracized.