Colin Cotterill - Curse of the Pogo Stick

“Well, I’m not exactly dead yet but, of course, it was my pleasure,” Siri said. He’d topped himself up with water in the village so his eyes watered nicely at the sight of this pretty pair in front of him. “And perhaps I could ask you a favor.”

“Anything,” the boy said.

“The fliers. The men who were in this plane when it went down.”

“They were American pilots, sir. I buried their remains. I gave them a decent send off.”

“A Hmong funeral?”

“Just a little one, sir. As best as I could remember it.”

“That was very good of you. But their souls aren’t content where they are. They want to go home.”

The boy nodded and Chamee squeezed his hand.

“I can understand that. We’ve felt something here.”

“I need to find their families.”

“They didn’t have dog tags, sir. The American fliers at

Long Chen weren’t encouraged to wear them because they weren’t supposed to be here.”

“Never mind, son.” Siri nodded. “We have the number of the plane. It shouldn’t be that hard to identify them. Where are they?”

Siri walked forlornly down the hill to the village with the remains of Daniel (Danny) San Souci and Eric Stone wrapped in a strip of tarpaulin. Their names were on personal letters they’d carried with them, probably against regulations. But the men who fought the secret war were tough, experienced pilots who lived every day as if it were the last because, for many of them, it was. These two had probably outweighed Siri by a few hundred pounds when they were alive, but now he carried them both under one arm. They were the reason why the Otherworld had been set in a Western city on Siri’s journey. The spirits of Danny and Eric had erected the scenery. It was they, not Chamee, who had coaxed Siri to the beyond. Theirs were the souls that needed rescuing from limbo, not hers. It wasn’t clear how the green button had made it into the rock pool, but it had obviously belonged to one of the pilots. When they saw it, the spirits could sense how close Siri had come to finding their remains. It had given them hope. It was his duty now to put them to rest.

The village was laid out before him, lifeless and without soul. Lumps of disused buildings perched on a hillside. Then something moved by the main house. At first he thought it might be Judge Haeng out looking for some new way to do away with himself, but as he got closer he could see a pony tethered there. A Hmong girl sat on the outside bench. He quickened his pace, but when he rounded the house he saw Dia skimming her sandaled feet over the dust.

“Dia, what’s wrong?”

“Hello, Yeh Ming. Nothing big,” she said. “I’m the fastest rider so they sent me back to let you know what we decided. I have to catch up with them.”

He sat on the bench beside her.

“What happened?”

“We met another group. They were on their way to join the big march too. They told Elder Long about relatives of theirs who’d gone before. They’d traveled at night to avoid PL patrols and the Vietnamese troops. They said a lot of the PL soldiers still hate us from the war and they kill our people on sight. No arrest, just bang bang. They had to be very quiet so they wouldn’t be spotted. In the daytime the Hmong could sleep somewhere hidden away, but…”

She looked at the distance and tried to steady her voice.

“But what?”

“But often the group’s location was given away by little children. A baby would cry and the PL would find the group and kill all of them. Some groups were so afraid they abandoned mothers and infants or they accidentally suffocated the babies trying to keep them quiet.”

“That’s awful.”

“So, Elder Long thought…” She looked sheepish.

“Where are they?”

She smiled and pointed to the shaman’s hut.

“Elder Long says it will just be until we get to Thailand. He says for you to give me an address and he’ll contact you and we can find a way to get them over the river. He said you’d know a way because you’re Yeh Ming.”

Siri’s laughter filled the valleys around. It was apparent from the look on her face that Dia couldn’t understand why this was so funny. She’d rather expected him to be angry. But Siri had his reason. The prophesy had come true in the most roundabout way. Two months earlier, Auntie Bpoo, the transvestite fortune-teller, had predicted Siri would be married and have two children before the rains started. At the time it hadn’t seemed credible, not to mention physically possible. Now he had no choice but to formally add one more branch of sorcery to his list of irrational beliefs. Fortune-telling had become a science. Soon there’d be nothing but politics left to dismiss as bunkum.

“Oh, I brought you back a goat as well,” Dia said.

“Two babies and a goat on one little pony. You should be in the circus.”

“Bao said you’d need it ‘cause she didn’t think you’d be able to breast-feed the twins yourself.”

“Very thoughtful of her.”

“And she said she misses you.”

“Tell her I miss her too. I miss all of you. I won’t sleep till I know you’re safe in Thailand.”

Dia climbed onto her pony and turned three circuits until they were pointed in the right direction.

“Oh, and there’s a platoon of PL soldiers two ridges across. You might want to do something to get their attention. They’ve got the same sense of direction as your assistant,” she laughed. “Bye, Yeh Ming.”

Siri stood and watched her ride off. They were all so positive, so good-humored. They were setting off on a journey of a hundred and fifty kilometers through hostile country. When they reached the limits of the lands they knew and trusted, they would abandon the animals and cover the final stretch on foot. The odds of all of them making it were poor. Yet they could still joke and talk of adventure. In their hearts they must have known that the lives their families had lived for centuries were to become legend.

Siri said good morning to the twins, selected a particularly splendid Zippo from the collection, and returned to set fire to the main hut.

The brand-new Mi-8 helicopter touched down directly on the grounds of Mahosot Hospital. Until the warranty ran out it would continue to have a Russian pilot at the controls, which explains why it didn’t remove the hospital roof or land in the trees. It did, however, manage to blow all of the new chrysanthemums out of their bed. Stretcher bearers crouching low ran to the open hatchway, carefully lifted Judge Haeng onto the canvas, and whisked him away. The helicopter could have taken him to the temporary field hospital in Sam Neua in the north, but Siri had insisted the man’s condition was so grave they had no choice but to take him directly to Vientiane.

It mattered not a jot to Siri that the judge had no condition to speak of. Apart from the broken wrist, once his boss had slept off the drug, he would be his old disagreeable self within twenty-four hours. Siri was just tired and he wanted to go home. Despite the incomprehensible ranting of the pilot, he insisted on remaining on board until the rotors had stopped spinning. He decided he was already short enough, thank you, and he preferred a dignified homecoming.

French medical and US military choppers had arrived frequently at the hospital during the war years but, four years later, all flights had stopped. So it wasn’t surprising that doctors and nurses and patients came spilling out of their buildings to look at the spectacularly gleaming Russian craft. To Siri’s profound disappointment, Dtui and Geung were not among them. He’d hoped to impress them.

He handed the twins, now crying in coordinated stereo, to two maternity nurses and asked them to take care of the infants. He told them he’d stop by later. He walked to the morgue, carrying the remains of Danny and Eric under his arm, his only luggage. One of the uprooted chrysanthemums lay on the morgue’s welcome mat as if it were insisting on an autopsy. The door was padlocked and for some mysterious reason his key didn’t work. He wondered why they’d needed to change a three-month-old lock. He went to the office window but the curtains were drawn tightly and there was no gap to allow him to see inside.