Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

Siri awoke with the type of head a man who drinks half a barrel of rough rice liquor deserves. His mouth was as dry as the average skeleton’s eye socket. He tried to swallow and his windpipe constricted the way an empty balloon might if you sucked instead of blew. His old heart quivered and his bladder felt solid as a bowling ball. If ever Laos were to establish a temperance league he felt sure he could be its poster boy. He rolled painfully onto his back. Something was missing from the collage of life around him. The sun was sawing through the loose thatch, which meant the morning mist had already burned off and he’d overslept. That led him to the conclusion that he’d probably reneged on his promise to help with the morning chores.

He eased his neck against the crick and once more reached to scratch the absent earlobe. That’s when he noticed the cloth beside him on the platform. It was the most beautifully embroidered pa n’tow he had ever seen. He held it up in front of his face. It was a handcrafted picture on blue/gray cloth no more than eighteen inches square but months of work had gone into its sewing. He held it to his nose and could smell the familiar natural scent of its maker. Bao hadn’t struck him as the embroidering type but he knew the skill would have been passed down from her grandmother and mother when she was a little girl. She had learned her lesson beautifully.

He studied the frieze, a photographic moment from the village. There were the houses, the ponies, and the livestock. The spring pond lay in white lines on the hill and wild animals came to drink from it. Women milled around the village in their fine costumes, one swollen with child. Young folk played and men worked. Elder Long and his departed wife, Zhong, stood proudly at its center holding hands. And, almost as an afterthought, a cloud floated across the sky and on it sat an old man with green eyes and white hair. Above his head, a ring of yellow thread made a halo.

Siri lay back and smiled at his gift, he traced the raised cotton of Bao’s needlecraft, and he fancied he smelled her there too on his pillow. Only then did it occur to him what was missing from the village-sound. An unexplained anxiety fell over him. He looked toward the shaman’s altar. The pogo stick and all its trappings were gone. He forgot his aches and pains and made for the door. Once his eyes were accustomed to the bright sunlight he was able to look about him at the empty village. There were no animals. The chicken coup and stable were empty. No surviving pigs, no goats, no reincarnated dogs. And no people.

He hurried across the compound to the main house and stood in the doorway. The room partitions were disassembled and the dirt floor had been excavated here and there: one hole beneath the central beam where once the placentas of all newborns were buried, others around the rim where valuables had probably been hidden to keep them safe from marauders during the unattended days. The silver jewelry and ornaments he’d seen little sign of since his arrival had gone with their owners. With the whisky still buzzing in their heads, the Hmong had packed their valuables and their opium nuggets and their salted pig meat and they’d left. And Siri had slept through it all. His chest felt empty as if some important organ had been removed from it. He held the pa n ‘tow to his nose and breathed in the strength and youth of his General Bao and the courage of her tribe.

If he hadn’t been so dehydrated, he might have even managed a tear or two. Something about the countryside released the emotions that remained bottled in the city. Perhaps he wasn’t just sad for the plight of these friends, perhaps it was a global, all-encompassing sadness that included his whole country, and the hopelessness of life, and the fact that there would never really be peace in the world because man was intrinsically stupid. At that moment, with the mother of all hangovers pounding in his head, he felt he shouldered the misery of every victim in the universe.

He gulped down several mouthfuls of water from the communal urn and carried a bowl to the hut of weak-minded Assistant Haeng. The judge had that soggy gray look of someone who’d slept too long. Siri dribbled water into his mouth and watched him swallow in his sleep. He folded the judge’s indigo hands across his chest so he looked like a gloved body in a coffin.

“Rest in peace,” he said, and left the judge to collect more dreams that might absorb and overwhelm his confusing reality of the past few days.

Siri made his way up the hill, passed the charred and still smoking remains of the haunted house, and carried on over the crest and down the hidden trail they’d walked the day before. The feeling of unrest was particularly strong here but at least he now knew what malevolent spirits he was dealing with. It was a steep drop to the valley but Siri had lived in mountains for a large chunk of his life. He negotiated the rocky trail like a goat. It wasn’t long before he reached the transporter, almost completely shrouded in jungle.

“Don’t worry,” Siri called. “It’s me, Yeh Ming. I’m alone.”

The boy appeared behind him on the narrow trail with a fearsome-looking submachine gun.

“Good morning, sir,” he said, like a high-school student addressing his teacher.

“How’s my patient?”

“She’s very fine, sir. Very fine.”

He led Siri to the back of the plane where Chamee lay on a bunched-up parachute. She was a far better color than she’d been the day before. He checked the pulse and temperature of the little mother and asked permission to look at the incision. She nodded and talked to the roof of the plane while he checked his handiwork.

“Bao came,” she said.

“What?” He stopped.

“Bao, she came to see me early this morning.”

“Really? How on earth did she find you?”

“You told her we were here.”

“Even so, it isn’t the easiest trail to pick up, especially before light.”

“Our Bao is special.”

“Yes, I think she is. And?”

He was pleased with the wound and began to change the dressing.

“She was kind. She pretended to be mad at first. But then she said she understood what we did. She knew people would be disgusted with us and it was better for the boys if they were raised by the others. But she didn’t want us to disappear. She said if I had a problem I should try to contact her through our clan.”

“That was good of her.”

“Yes, she’s given me hope. She gave me a message for you too.”

Siri tried to hang on to his professional demeanor. “Oh?”

“She said you and your assistant should stay where you are and that you’ll be rescued soon.”

“Oh, I see. How could she be so sure of that?”

“The geng.”

“Of course.”

Siri had changed the dressing and was confident there would be no problem. She was a hardy young thing and would live to be a hundred, he told her.

“And she said for me to tell you…” She smiled at her boy husband. “That she’s sorry she couldn’t marry you yet but she has to guide her people to safety. She’ll come back to you after they’ve found a new home.”

“What a silly thing to say,” Siri blushed.

“She loves you, Yeh Ming.”

Siri busied himself with bandages and lint.

“And, of course, I’m very fond of her. In a sort of great-grandfatherly kind of way.” He was annoyed that he’d felt it necessary to categorize his love. The young soldier contributed to the emotion of the moment without the slightest embarrassment.

“And we love you too, sir. Me and Chamee. If you weren’t here my woman would be dead by now. We’ll always remember you and say prayers to you at the ceremony of the ancestors.”