Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

But tigers grow quickly, and one year after the big cat had joined the household, Thomas agreed with his wife that the tiger was a real and present danger: although in his affectionate behavior Elijah Cat (the name was David's choice) presented himself in every way but size a normal housecat, in recent months he had gone from goat's milk to goats, stalking and killing them as an ordinary housecat might kill mice. Thomas was not entirely sure, however, just how he was to go about evicting the animal, tigers being notoriously resistant to gentle persuasion.

Then, one foggy morning in March 1970, Thomas stepped out of the house he had built to pee off the porch, as was his wont, and noticed foreign men in dark uniforms carrying guns. That was the day the Walkers were cast out of Eden Valley. In the end, the Walkers' eviction from Eden saved Thomas from the necessity of action: Elijah Cat was just another thing lost when the Walkers were forced to leave, missionaries being somewhat more tractable than tigers, and the only Christian tiger in all of northern Burma was left to roam the faraway hills, far from the shelter of the fold.

The last thing Laura saw of Eden Valley as she was led out at gunpoint over the hills with her family was the smoke from her house and Raymond's orchard, which the soldiers had set on fire. She began to cry. Raymond, wearing the last of his surviving wool suits, gathered his wife in her tattered housedress under his long arm and in a clear low voice reminded her that soon they would be living in a Mansion. He stroked her gray hair gently, and with the back of his hand wiped tears from her cheeks, and when she seemed to have calmed enough to listen to the Word of God, he quoted Scripture: "How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!" The notion that others before them had suffered as she did now consoled her somewhat, and with a heavy step Laura left behind the only real home she would ever have.

HELENA MYANGwas David Walker's aunt, not mine, but it didn't take long before I started to think of her as Aunt Helena, and once by accident I think I even called her "Aunt Helena."

She was everyone's favorite aunt, just hip enough with her kooky yellow sunglasses and hoop earrings and the way she cussed when she stubbed her toe — you wouldn't think an old lady would even know those words, much less an old missionary lady — that if you're a young Walker, you might think that maybe there is some hope in your genes after all. But Aunt Helena was also not so far off the family reservation that she didn't understand where you're coming from, having had the same experiences herself, when you complain that you're almost thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and bigger than your father and Dad still won't stop pointing at you in the middle of his preaching and saying that his boy there won't ever be big as him, that's how soon the end of the world is coming. Because Thomas did in the end grow into his Dad, believing the same things as old Raymond, chiefly that this weary world would soon be coming to an end, and using his father's tricks and tactics to convince the Dyalo to get right with God before the gates of Heaven were locked down; and David grew into his Dad, thinking that his father just didn't get it, the way the younger generation thought about things and that things here in this new country — Thailand, in David's case — just weren't like the way things were in the places where Dad had been young and at the top of his game. So David would complain to Aunt Helena, and Aunt Helena would listen to him patiently and lovingly, because he was her favorite nephew, and she'd tell him that one day, and it wouldn't be long, he'd be all grown up and he could go where he wanted and do as he liked, the important thing being to remember that his Dad loved him, a response which satisfied David precisely as much as that response has satisfied any frustrated adolescent anywhere.

Aunt Helena said that if I wanted to understand where David went when he went just where he liked, I should talk to a man named Rabbit, who lived in Boulder. Aunt Helena had his phone number in her little red phone book. He had gotten in touch with her after David's death, and the two of them had passed a tearful hour on the phone, remembering David. Rabbit was totally cool about my confusion with time zones— Rachel's grandmother wasn't the only one who found that an unusually tricky arithmetical operation — and thus my disturbing him at three in the morning: he said he was up anyway, dubbing mix tapes. I told him who I was and what I was working on. Then we got to talking about David.

Rabbit called him the Big Bamboo. "You ever see a picture of David? Long, tall, skinny, like a stalk of bamboo. It was Jerry who got the Bamboo's head right," Rabbit said. "Jerry just had an effect on him, you know? Of course, Jerry had an effect on all of us, but there was something special between the Big Bamboo and Jerry. Bamboo went on tour as messed up as any of us, and then Jerry just played six-string therapy out there, until the Bamboo felt like it was time to go back and do what he had to do. Man, I loved that guy. I can't believe he's dead."

I wasn't sure if Rabbit meant Jerry Garcia or David Walker, but I guess both were pretty tough blows.

Hot season, 1973, and Randy Cooper, whose father worked at the American embassy in Chiang Mai doing something that involved water buffalo, could not believe that David was such a dickwad that he had never ever seen a real movie in a real movie theater, indeed, had never seen a movie in his entire life.

"I told you," David said. He was twelve years old. "We used to live in the jungle. I mean, really in the jungle, where there wasn't even electricity and stuff. I had a pet tiger. I told you."

"Still a dickwad, Tarzan."

With Randy Cooper's explosive "dickwad," David realized that everything had changed. Since the family's arrival in Chiang Mai a little over two years earlier, David had been trading on the story of his adventures in the jungle, his account of the family's lonely homestead in the farthest reaches of northern Burma reaching a stirring crescendo with his account of his pet tiger. The story had produced big eyes in its first-grade recitals, and contemptuous "No ways" in the more skeptical sixth grade, until David produced for his classmates a photograph of himself with Elijah Cat in his lap. Aunt Helena showed me the photo: a bare-chested boy with a sweet goofy smile and an awful homemade haircut, sitting cross-legged on a bamboo floor with an honest-to-God tiger cub bent backward over his thigh. All four of the tiger's paws were in the air, and David was rubbing its belly. So it was all true after all. David had been enrolled in the fifth grade (at age level, to his grandmother's pride), when they came over from Eden Valley, and through the end of sixth grade, that photograph, explaining David's oddness and proving his extraordinary pedigree, had been the difference between dorkhood and grudging popularity.

But even the most wonderful story, told too often, loses the power to compel; and David's, which was his little part of the story the Walkers told of themselves, now provoked only withering glances of indifference from the other kids at school, who had heard the jungle stories when David didn't know how to play dodgeball; when he admitted that he had never heard of the Rolling Stones; when he couldn't ride a bicycle; and when he wasn't sure just who the president of the United States was— although David could have easily identified a dozen varieties of snake and pronounced them poisonous or benign, ably assisted in the construction of a thatch-and-bamboo home, identified all of the signs of the Rapture, or recited more lines of Scripture than anyone in school cared to hear, in both Dyalo and English. Indeed, by seventh grade David was no longer even the possessor of the most exotic story in class: Sarabeth Morgan's parents had been aid workers in Laos, and Sarabeth had grown up in a Hmong village, until the family was driven out by the war. She had seen a massacre, and had lost an adopted brother. She had arrived in Chiang Mai just this year, and her fresh stories made David's tales seem wilted and antique. David felt that it was time to put the photo of Elijah Cat back in the album and begin to accept that Eden Valley was gone forever, and that he lived now in Chiang Mai, where people went to the movies if they didn't want to be dickwads.