Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and the Old Dogs

Dtui’s cramped legs took her as fast as they could to her room. It was empty, the bedding untouched, nothing had been moved. She lay on the thin mattress and breathed heavily.

“Think, Dtui, think.”

She couldn’t act rashly or make accusations because it was possible that Phosy’s disappearance was all part of his acceptance by the resistance. She couldn’t damage his cover. All she could do was fuss like a wife alone in a refugee camp whose husband had vanished. If her actions brought too much attention to the camp’s covert activities she was sure someone would invite her to join a volleyball team.

She walked in the direction of Court Four, stopping at each corner to describe her husband and ask whether anyone had seen him. At the court she sat on a bench, looking out at the soft clay that didn’t boast one single footprint. A stray black ridgeback came to sniff at her feet.

“What would I do, dog?” she asked. “What would I do if I loved my husband? Who would a desperate housewife turn to?”

Twenty minutes later she arrived at the whitewashed facade of the office of the Church of the Christian Brotherhood. Her tears were genuine, her words contrived.

“I lose my husband,” she called in English through the open doorway. When nothing happened she tried again. “My life is finish. I kill myself.” Again there was an absence of movement from inside and she was wondering whether the office might be unoccupied when a young Western man stepped out of the shadows. He was painfully thin and yellowish like bamboo in a bad year. His hair was an orange mop and he wore clothes that could only have been donated to a charity store.

“What are you saying out here?”

To a Lao whose English had arrived courtesy of dense American textbooks and the odd BBC World Service broadcast, his Irish accent was totally incomprehensible. She enunciated slowly, hoping her clarity would encourage him to improve his own English.

“My husband is loss. Please help me.”

“Do you have an appointment? he asked.

It was Dtui’s uncontrollable torrent of tears that made the man forgo his timetable and escort her inside. Brother Fred was just a young man entrusted with the administrative duties of an interdenominational mission. He’d gone straight from the seminary to a church office. Souls weren’t his speciality. Technically, Dtui was the first victim he’d had to deal with directly, the first refugee who’d spoken to him without the filter of a local Christian interpreter. But on this day adversity had confronted him face to face and he found himself with an obligation. Despite her tears and his language problem, they were able to piece together the story, and the young servant of the Lord agreed to help her find Phosy.

It didn’t take long for Dtui to realize she’d probably have been better off without him. He’d marched her with great bluster into all the Non-Governmental Organization offices and before all the Thai government representatives and told them that this poor woman had lost her husband. But Dtui had noticed their undisguised yawns. So, while he sat in the camp administration center trying to get a call through to the Vatican or some such place, she backed away and left him fondling his worry beads.

She returned to Area Thirty-four, rechecked her own empty room, and found Bunteuk’s house deserted. None of the neighbors had seen his young wife since the previous day. Bunteuk was off at the weekly camp coordination meeting, they told her. Once more she retraced Phosy’s steps to Court Four and sat on the bench by the bamboo fence. Her dog friend was still where she’d left him. He came to sit by her.

“Either he came here,” she said, “or he was kidnapped on the way. Unlikely in a busy camp at ten in the morning. So let’s say he arrived and sat right here. There were no volleyball players so getting him here had to be a ruse. Why here?”

There was only one logical reason. This had to be an established escape route from the camp. She stood on her bench and was still four feet from the top of the bamboo. Phosy could have made it but it would have taken a front-end loader to get Dtui over. She climbed down and watched the dog scratching at the fence a few yards away. He looked up at her and continued to scratch as if he wanted to be let out. Dtui walked along the fence testing the slats. All of them were nailed and firm until she reached the dog. The fencing there didn’t give way exactly but it felt suspended rather than attached. She squeezed her fingers between the slats until she had enough grip to pull them forward. The dog’s excited reaction told her he was used to getting in and out this way.

The fence swung forward on some kind of hinge and the dog raced out through the gap at the bottom. It was only three-quarters of a Dtui wide, but a lot of her was soft and malleable and she was able to squeeze herself through it like a jellyfish through a mailbox slot. On the outside she readjusted herself and breathed heavily. She’d just illegally left a refugee camp. Dtui was an escapee. It was all rather exciting. She had no idea what she was likely to achieve through this folly but it felt so much better to be active. It was certainly better than following Brother Fred around. Perhaps a wife would go to these lengths to find the man she loved.

She looked around her. She was in a clearing. Most of the surrounding forest had been massacred to build the camp. She imagined the upheaval this must have caused to the tree spirits and wondered whether Thai Phibob were as vengeful as those in Laos. Just one scrawny tree stood in the center of the cleared land. It was obviously too gaunt and gnarled to offer up useful timber. It was twisted and warped like some haunted tree in a myth. But despite its deformities, its foliage was thick and rich and its seedpods had begun to crack and distribute their booty to the land. The insides of the split pods were bright scarlet, and, from a distance, it looked as if the mother tree had bled to produce her young.

Dtui walked closer and took hold of one pod. It filled her hand. She looked at it with astonishment. It had the most human characteristic she’d ever seen in a plant. The edges of the pod rounded into the shape of the lips. At their convergence, a bud, moist and ripe, formed the clitoris. And opposite, where the pod joined the stem connecting it to the tree, was a dark channel. In obstetrics, Dtui had handled many such organs, but they’d all been attached to females- Homo sapiens females. In her hand she held a genuine…

“That’s a yonee peesaht,” said a deep voice from behind her. She jumped guiltily and turned to see a smiling old man in a large cowboy hat carrying a slingshot. “The Devil’s Vagina, they call it. Knocks your kneecaps right off, don’t it?”

He didn’t seem at all flustered in the presence of an escaped illegal alien. Something about his arsenal suggested he wasn’t a bounty hunter.

“It’s incredible, she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It always gives newcomers a chuckle the first time they see one. There used to be a lot more around here. They say the young fellas stole so many pods for you-know-what that there weren’t enough seeds left to keep the species going. Don’t know if it’s true, mind.”

Dtui laughed. “Uncle, I wouldn’t be surprised if you just made that up yourself.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised by that either.”

Their language was identical, their bond instant. It was only the Mekhong that prevented the two from sharing a nationality. The river cut through the center of a Lao community with one history and one culture. It should have been a main artery rather than a dividing line. But rivers are often assigned the unpleasant duty of marking a border. A million Lao awoke one day to find they were Thai. The waterway that had once united now separated families and made them unwilling enemies. There was no going back. Only by draining the Mekhong and filling it in would the Lao race ever be reunited.