Tony Hillerman - Finding Moon

“Could you buy poison for the darts if you wanted it?”

“I never asked,” she said. “But I think they still hunt with blowguns back in the hills, so they’d have to make the poison. It would be trouble for the importers, though.”

“Just imagine. You could carry one of those right through the metal detectors at airport security and then hijack the airliner,” said Moon, who found he was enjoying this conversation. “I wonder why the terrorists haven’t thought of it.”

The frogs had become used to them by now and reassured by their silences. Now there was frog song all around them, and from somewhere near, a whistling, and from somewhere far away, the sound of something huffing and grunting.

“We don’t have many night sounds in the mountains,” Moon said. “Just silence in the winter. In the summer, sometimes you hear the coyotes, and that starts the dogs barking.”

“You’re a long way from home,” she said. “Halfway around the world.”

Moon thought about that. This was like a totally different planet.

“Did you hear any news today?”

“No,” Moon said.

“There was a radio-shortwave I think-playing at the hotel in town. It said ARVN troops had commandeered two evacuation planes at one of the big airports. They threw off the civilians. Running away.”

“Urn,” Moon said.

“They said Vietcong and North Viet troops had captured the provincial capital just north of Saigon. And the airport north of Saigon had been hit by rockets.”

Moon could think of nothing to say.

“And they had a report from Bangkok. Refugees from Cambodia were saying that the Khmer Rouge were forcing city people out into the country. That whole towns were being totally emptied and the Khmer Rouge were killing those who looked professional.”

“It doesn’t sound reasonable,” Moon said. “It sounds like propaganda. Don’t you think so?”

She sat looking out through the sound of the frogs, across the road, across the rice paddy, into the jungle. The moonlight illuminated her face, but the jungle was dark.

She said, “Are you ever afraid?”

She was looking at him now and Moon studied her expression, not sure exactly what she meant. She was hunched forward, hugging herself.

“I’m afraid sometimes,” she added. “When I let myself think of going into Cambodia, I’m terrified.”

Moon had parted his lips, beginning the standard

reassurance, which was something like, There’s nothing to be afraid of. But he bit that off. There was a hell of a lot to be afraid of.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I don’t think you should go. Surely your brother will come out.”

“No,” she said. “He won’t. So I am also terrified that I won’t be able to get to him there. And then I am terrified that I will be able to get there, and the Khmer Rouge will get me. Afraid of what they would do to me. Afraid that Damon already is dead.” She paused. “Just scared. Of everything. Of failing. Of being alone. Of being alive. Of dying. I really doubt if you can understand this business of being afraid.”

“I can,” Moon said. He saw she was shivering.

“Did you ever wish you could be little again? Just a child with somebody taking care of you?”

“Yes,” Moon said.

“Really?”

“Sure,” Moon said. “To tell the truth, I’m afraid too. Right now.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I don’t know what I’m getting into. I don’t know who I can trust. It’s like-” He tried to think of an analogy. “Like walking around with a blindfold on.”

She laughed. “You’re trying to make me feel better. To make me cheerful. I can’t imagine you being afraid. Ricky told me too much about you.”

“Ricky didn’t know what he was talking about,” Moon said.

The faintest hint of a breeze stirred the palm fronds somewhere behind them. Moon smelled dampness, the yeasty smell of decaying vegetation, and the perfume of flowers. The frogs were totally reassured now; their calls rose to full volume.

“I should go and see if they have a room for me,” Mrs. van Winjgaarden said. She pushed herself, wearily, up from the palm trunk.

Of course, Moon thought. She would be exhausted. He’d taken a shower, rested awhile, had a drink. She’d spent the time inspecting cockroaches, trying to get a cab, and making the long dark trek through the darkness up the potholed road.

He carried her bag. She explained that the whistling was the mating signal of the male of a species of tree lizard, and the odd high-note low-note call they were hearing now was from the gecko, another climbing lizard, and the huffing came from water buffaloes resting after a day’s work in the rice paddies.

“And how about that sweet smell?” Moon asked. “Sort of like vanilla?”

Mrs. van Winjgaarden gave him the name of the vine that produced that aroma. It was a Dutch word. As he repeated it after her, Moon became aware that he no longer felt quite so lonely.

PARIS , April 22 (Agence France-Presse)- The French government today urgently appealed for speedy resumption of negotiations to carry out the 1973 Paris agreement on Vietnam and for an immediate cease-fire.

THE SOUND OF RAIN POUNDING against his window had awakened Moon during the night. But by midmorning it had blown out over the South China Sea. The sky over Palawan Island wasn’t the dark deep blue that Moon had learned to expect in the Colorado high country, but it was as blue as it gets in the tropics. And the sun was bright enough to raise Moon’s spirits. It also produced a barely visible haze of steam from the potholes, rice paddies, and roadside ditches and sent the humidity up to steambath levels.

“I still don’t think they’re going to let you in,” he told Osa van Winjgaarden, who was jolting along. beside him in the back seat of their converted jeep taxi. “Prisons aren’t going to let strangers in without any sort of credentials or passes.”

“If they don’t, then they don’t,” Osa said. “Then I will just follow your plan. I’ll take the taxi back to the hotel and get out and send it back to pick you up.”

The tone was complacent, however. Moon glanced at her. Clearly Osa van Winjgaarden didn’t expect she would be taking the taxi back to the hotel.

Neither did the cabdriver, a tiny middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. Moon, who was trying to develop a better eye for things Asiatic, thought he might be part Chinese. Or perhaps, this far south, it was a Malay look. His cab, however, was distinctly Filipino. It was painted with pink, purple, and white stripes, with the name COCK SLAYER superimposed on both sides in a psychedelic yellow. Plastic statues of two fighting cocks facing each other in attack positions were mounted on the hood, a location that forced the cabbie to tilt his head to see past them when he rounded a curve. The cabbie had quickly lost patience with the argument in the back seat over Osa’s admissibility to the prison.

“They let her in,” he said, waving a hand impatiently. “No question. We all go in. I park at the office in there. I write down the time I wait for you. All right?”

The gate to the Palawan Island Federal Security Unit proved to be a large palm log blocking the narrow road. The log was overlooked by a palmthatched bamboo hut, which rose on bamboo stilts from the roadside ditch. A neatly printed sign above its door read IWAHIG PRISON AND PENAL FARM.

The cab stopped. Two men wearing blue coveralls emerged from the hut. If either of them was armed, Moon saw no evidence of it.

Cabbie and guards exchanged pleasantries and information in a language that wasn’t English and didn’t sound like the Tagalog Moon had been hearing in Manila. The older of the security men tipped his cap to Osa, gave Moon a curious stare, and held out his hand.