Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

In a dying hotel called the Tamarind Tree, Simon and Sothea also slept together in a fifteen-dollar room. It was a small and unremarkable settlement on the river and there was a temple on the far side of the motionless water with a gold-leaf stupa and a radio tower that cast its shadow over a pond filled with decayed hyacinth. They had seen it for a moment before night fell, a vision of bright modernized faith. Through the air fell delicate snowlike ash from a plant of some kind, a crematorium Sothea had said when they arrived, though he knew it must have been a kiln. Across the street stood an office of the Sam Rainy Party, where no one had been seen that day, and the padlocked shophouses had not been opened after their arrival. The little town seemed to have fallen into a sleep, though cats sat erect and sarcastic under the yellow flamboyants. The sun sliced across it and failed to rouse any life. Only the birds screamed.

When Simon woke he heard koel birds whooping in disheveled backyards and the half-abandoned park that lay against the river. He raised his hand to his eyes to block out the light. Where were they? He wrapped a towel around his middle and stumbled out onto a cement balcony, where a laundry line held their drying underwear and Sothea’s last good miniskirt. The owner of the hotel was in the mud yard below making tea with a hot plate, and a swarm of tanagers had come to pick off the pieces of bread that lay scattered around her. The woman looked up for a moment with amicable hostility. What did one say to such men first thing in the morning? A simple “Get lost” wouldn’t quite do. She smiled instead, and muttered the usual “Sous’dey” and her guest stepped back with his eyes squinting, as if still stoned from the night before.

He looked over the wall of the hotel into the street and saw the trees still wet from the rain and tractors dragging loads down it. He couldn’t even remember the name of the place — they had arrived in the middle of the night and taken their dope within an hour. They must have passed out before midnight and gone into an impenetrable enraged sleep. His eyes felt dry and his mouth had emptied of saliva. What day was it? Beyond the town there were mountains, green jade hills that he knew. Smoke rose in wisps from fires set in those hills, and he remembered those fires as well. They had seen them the previous day between the rains. His hand shook, a small vibration rather, and he went down to the ground floor in a cold fury to see if he could scrounge some coffee or, a worse option, venture into the street and buy some. The owner offered him tea and told him that they had Nescafé if he wanted to take that up to his girlfriend.

He woke Sothea with the Nescafé mixed with sugar and milk and they played some music for a while and made love in the glow of the thin orange curtains.

“Why are we here?” she kept saying. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember, baby? We got high after we arrived. We drove in our new car all the way.”

“Oh, the car,” she sighed.

“We still have the car. It’s down in the street.”

“Coffee is good.”

“I made it sweet like you like it.”

“It tastes like arabica.”

He laughed. “It’s Nescafé with Carnation.”

She was still half dressed in yesterday’s clothes, as he was, and after the shared coffee they took a cold shower while the radio played. Sothea then stepped out onto the balcony and recovered her miniskirt and dressed herself studiously in front of the bathroom mirror. She remembered nothing at all of the previous twenty-four hours. She thought Simon would remember it for her. If anything needed remembering, Simon remembered it.

While she did this, he packed their shared suitcase by simply throwing all the bits and pieces into it and placing the needles and junk at the bottom and the clothes on top of them. It was an inept concealment but it was instinct by now. They could wait until after lunch before taking a hit, or they could skip lunch and go into the forest when the heat came and get their juice. In the end, it would probably be neither. They went down at checkout time and threw the bag into the trunk of the car with the money and strolled down the lone main street to get some lok-lok and beers. The soil had dried so much that the constant wind kicked up a fine dust. They sat at a metal table in their heavy shades and ate morosely, trying to clear their heads and feel human again. Gradually everything came back to normal. They had taken off without much planning and now they still had no plan. Simon thought about making a run for the border and going into Thailand for a while. He had friends here and there, and they could score some nice stuff in Bangkok while living free. But soon he turned away from the idea. The border was always tricky. He didn’t know if the English boy had panicked and gone to the police. They wouldn’t care, but they might figure there was a bribe in it for them if they caught him at the border and made things unpleasant for him. They were malicious enough to do that. Instead, then, he thought of a place he knew in the mountains where he’d been before to lie low. It was a lodge owned by a Scot who used to be a British soldier. It lay up among the minefields in the Cardamoms, on a track that was hard to find. He was sure he could find it.

“I’ve got just the place,” he said to Sothea. “You’re going to love it.”

“Hotel with swimming pool?”

“Not exactly, honey. But we have to lie low for a few days.”

“Low?”

“Yes, we have to be very quiet.”

She sulked while he paid the bill and they walked back to the car. It was an old secondhand Saber and it was on its last legs.

They drove out of the town into the bright hayfields where the old field guns lay on their sides like toys. Soon they were on the road to Pailin, but they were not going to go there. They took a turnoff and plowed into low, rolling hills dotted with manilkara. They swept into a desolate village and stopped for a cold Coke at a tiny, swarming market. Thousands of flies descended upon them and they stood helplessly in the sunlight while cripples with blown-off legs, land mine victims, closed in upon them as well with an unerring instinct for barang money. “I don’t have anything,” he snapped at them in Khmer and they backed off a little, incredulous, before regaining their courage. Sothea swore at them and there was a stalemate. They went back into the car and drove on, up a long, wooded hill until the road divided and the left fork was a dirt track snaking between thorn trees. They took it.

“I remember the way,” he said, to reassure her. “Don’t worry, you’ll like it. It’s got a tree house. And a river.”

“I don’t care no river.”

“All the same…”

She thought he looked a little crazy in the English boy’s clothes. They didn’t suit him, and they didn’t even fit him, and he turned overnight from an elegant entrepreneur to a hippie on the run. He told her it was useful to change identities since he had stolen a lot of money and then he told her impatiently not to ask any more about it. She sensed at once that he was running away from a lot more than that. Whom, then, had he double-crossed? He must have double-crossed someone far more formidable than that English boy, but he wouldn’t say. He didn’t want to worry her. Now, however, he seemed agitated and lost and his temper was flaring. They bumped along the narrower track and soon they were rising steeply through fields bordered by yellow UN tape with signs warning not to walk across them.

There were little wood bridges with boys in kramas with weapons in their laps waiting to skin a wristwatch or a few dollars, and when they saw the Saber with the barang they perked up, stood and hoisted the weapons onto their shoulders and came into the sun squinting. It was two dollars a crossing. They had a famished, hollow look. They stared at the Khmer girl in the passenger seat and there was a tense unease in the standoffish attempts at humor on the part of the American. In reality he was alarmed. He drove through quickly and up into slopes of burned grass and then a forest like England, the trees tall and willowy and silent in the hot sun. The track climbed up past lonely houses on stilts, their mud yards carefully swept, past Vietnamese tanks stuck for eternity at the edge of ravines of wildflowers. The car pitched left and right and Sothea held onto the overhead strap with a grim annoyance. At the edge of a larger, denser forest they came to another roadblock, this one manned by a policeman.