Saving Fish From Drowning (18 page)

“No worries,” Lulu said. “That sound, it is only pig not people.”

“My God, what’s happening to it?”

“Getting ready for a dinner,” Lulu answered. She drew a finger across her throat.
“Zzz.”

“Gross. People can be so mean and they don’t even know it,” Esmé said. She patted the puppy in the sling.

The group continued walking to the top of the hill. The screams had subsided into bleating. The pig’s voice grew weaker, softer. Then it stopped. Heidi felt sick. Death had come.

At the fork in the path, they took the route that was more narrow, believing it would lead to something less seen and more special. To Bennie, the village looked like rural Appalachia. It was a cluster of small hills, winding up-and-down paths that would accommodate slim-hipped people walking in single file. Two or three houses clung to each hill, and around each compound were gardens and animal pens. Smoke from coal fires rose, as did gnats, muddying the air.

Along the steeper inclines were steps fashioned out of a chunk of rock or a slim sheath of wood, just wide enough to accommodate a foot. Upright sticks had been pounded into the sides of the path to allow passersby to gain footing as they traversed this thoroughfare on rainy, muddy days.

They came to a pen that contained enormous pigs with coarse

hair. As the visitors approached, the pigs wagged their tails and snorted. Outside the pen, pink piglets roamed freely like pet dogs, seeking handouts from barefooted girls of nine or ten, who carried in one arm their bare-bottomed siblings. “Run, run,” Heidi whispered to the piglets. “You’re doomed.”

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Upon seeing the foreigners approach, three boys engaged in mock battle, whacking at one another with their best replicas of swords. The two smaller boys used sugarcane stalks, but the biggest, a show-off, had chosen bamboo, which was sturdier and quickly reduced the sugarcane swords to limp green shreds. Whack! Whack! They were ancient tribesmen keeping the village safe from invaders. The biggest boy took a running leap onto the back of a water buffalo that was resting on the side of the road. He wrestled the horns of the implacable beast, then gave it a mighty kick in the side, before declaring for himself another victory. The other boys imitated him, getting a running start to vault themselves onto the buffalo and tumbling off its spine like gymnasts at a hillbilly Olympiad. Had the water buffalo been so inclined, it could have risen to its mighty hooves and easily trampled or gored the boys in a second. What had this buffalo done in a past life that he must now serve happily as trampoline and vaulting horse?

My friends continued until they had come full circle. “This way,”

Lulu said, and she walked ahead into the dirt courtyard from where the awful noises had emanated. The freshly killed pig lay on its side on a platform made of stone. Blood pooled from its neck, and some had already been collected in a large bowl, where it could congeal. A grill held a huge pile of kindling twigs. Two men were starting the process of cleaning the pig, knives and buckets at the ready. In a corner, young women were sorting baskets of greens. To the left was a mud-brick house. A man emerged from the lightless interior and walked with authority toward the visitors. He and Lulu exchanged greetings in Jingpo. “How’s your grandmother this week?” she asked.

“Much better, I hope.”

After a few minutes, Lulu waved to my friends. “Come in, he is saying you are welcome to visit in courtyard, ask question, take photo. But he ask you please do not go into house. His grandmother is recently died and she is in there still. Today they get her ready for funeral feast.”

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A M Y T A N

“They’re going to
eat
her?” Esmé whispered to her mother. Marlena shook her head.

“Good God!” Bennie said. “We shouldn’t be here if they’re in mourning.”

“No, no, is okay,” Lulu assured him. “She was very old, over one hundred and four years and sick for long, long time.”

“A hundred and four?” Dwight interjected. “That’s impossible.”

“And why is that?” Vera said.

He shrugged. He should have let this one go, but he couldn’t.

“Look at the conditions here.”

“I see them,” Vera persisted. “It looks simple but peaceful, free of corporate stress and traffic jams.”

“Traffic would be the least of their problems,” Dwight said.

“There’s no sanitation, no heating. Half the people here don’t have a tooth left in their skull. I doubt they have a stock of antibiotics on hand. And look at those kids. One has a cleft palate, the other has a lazy eye—”

“It’s called amblyopia,” Vera corrected. She knew about such things; her organization funded a Well Baby Clinic for inner-city mothers.

Dwight gave her a funny look. “It’s also known as lazy eye.”

“‘Lazy’ is a pejorative term.”

Dwight laughed and shook his head. He had had “lazy eye” as a kid.

Lulu felt an argument brewing. “Come, come. Let’s visit this family. It is good luck for you to come in. If you are in household where someone has died, this dead person will carry away all your bad luck when she goes to the next world.” Had I also taken a load of bad luck with me? “This deed,” Lulu said, “brings a household much good karma. So everyone is happy. Come, let us receive happiness.”

All at once, Dwight looked stricken. A peculiar queasiness hit him and his stomach began to bloat, growing larger and larger by the sec1 1 8

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ond, as though some invisible force were growing, an alien, and now the creature was about to burst out through his stomach wall.

“Honey?” Roxanne said. “You look terrible. Are you sick?”

Dwight shook his head. “I’ll be okay.” His nausea doubled. The growing pressure turned into sharp kicks. His face turned the color of goose dung. He was not the sort who complained about pain. He had broken his leg once while skiing, and the sharp bone had protruded out of his skin. He had told jokes to the ski patrol guys who hauled him off the mountain.

This time he felt that he was about to die. Heart attack! Only thirty-one years old, and he was going to drop dead of a heart attack in a woebegotten village without a doctor and with no ambulance to get him out of there. His mind became confused, drunk with pain and the certainty that he was dying. He stumbled around, desperate for any remedy, deaf to his wife’s anxious questions. Some mysterious force was going to kill him. The old dead woman—they said she was carrying away their bad luck, leaving behind only the good. He was the bad one, whom nobody liked. His eyes locked, trying to hold his system in a tenuous balance. He couldn’t breathe, oh God, he couldn’t breathe. What should he do now? No medicines here. The British vet with the dog. He would have something. Where the hell was he? He glanced to the left, at the darkened house and its open door. Ghost in there. He saw the men with their evisceration tools, staring at him; he was their next victim. He turned and saw his fellow travelers glaring at him. Vera hated him. He knew that. She wanted him dead. Even his wife looked as if she didn’t care what happened to him. They had had an argument the night before. She had called him a self-centered asshole. She had hinted at divorce. He pushed his way past her and fell to the ground.

Within thirty-seven heaving seconds, Dwight’s stomach emptied itself of its contents. It was the accumulation of three meals that had 1 1 9

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remained undigested, thanks to the
Zanthoxylum
berries of the previous night’s dinner, which had anesthetized his gut into stasis. I shall not describe what those contents were, save to say they included many colorful things, which the piglets sought out and squabbled over and devoured.

A minute later, Dwight felt slightly less doomed. Death had passed him by. Five minutes later, he was able to stand up weakly. But he was a changed man. He felt defeated, all his bravado gone. Once again he was the boy who had been beaten up by the neighborhood kids, had the wind knocked out of him by a punch to his stomach, then another, and another.

“Dwight, honey?” Roxanne was asking quietly. “We’re going back to the bus. Can you walk by yourself?”

He looked up and shook his head, unable to speak. “Can we get a cart?” he heard Vera asking someone.

“No worries, I ask right now,” Lulu answered.

Vera added, “We can pay. Here. See if this is enough.” This was her forte, taking charge in a crisis.

Lulu started shouting to the owners of the house, who shouted back cooperatively with numerous suggestions and, at first, refusals of any compensation. An honorary gift for the deceased? Oh, in that case, it would be too polite, too good to be true.

Soon a two-wheeled cart was brought over, pulled by the water buffalo that had allowed the sword-fighting boys to jump on its back. Dwight nearly wept with gratitude. Harry and Moff kindly helped lift him. Roxanne’s face was drawn into motherly concern, and she stroked his brow. She still loved him. He wanted to weep.

The wonder of love had never felt stronger.

As the foreigners left the village, the members of the household thanked their dead matriarch for bringing them such good luck: ten U.S. dollars, and for nothing more than taking the cart down to the end of the road. Happiness for all.

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• 5 •

WE ALL DO

WHAT WE MUST

In border towns, everyone waits. So it is in Ruili. The fake-gem hustlers wait for the eager buyers of jade. The hoteliers shine the floors in anticipation of guests. The arms dealers and drug runners look for their contacts.

My friends were waiting for the border permit that would allow them to enter Myanmar via the northern end of the Burma Road.

This was agony for Bennie, who felt responsible for getting them in.

He would also be blamed if he did not. He was now eating sunflower seeds every minute of the day, as if each were a problem to be solved.

He cracked the shells, looked at the gray bodies inside, and swallowed them like sedatives, wishing he could stop the overwhelming sense of dread and think clearly. In light of the news that no Westerners had recently entered Myanmar via the overland route, he had no idea how he would accomplish getting everyone in. Only a A M Y T A N

few months earlier, the road had been opened for passage to third-country nationals, but thus far no one had figured out the hellacious and antiquated process necessary to gather paperwork and stamps of approval from the proper authorities. When Bennie checked the group into the hotel in Ruili, he asked the manager whether they might stay longer, if necessary.

“No worries,” said the manager. He looked at the list of twelve names Bennie had given him, along with the stack of passports, and compared it with his records. “And Miss Bibi Chen, she is not here?”

Bennie was blindsided to hear my name yet again. “She couldn’t come . . . a last-minute problem . . . I’m the tour leader now. My travel agent
did
notify you.”

The man frowned. “Notify me?”

“What I mean is, the office of tourism. It should say that in your records. It does, doesn’t it? . . .”

“Yes, yes, I see that now. She had accident and is in hospital.” He looked up with another frown. “Terrible news.”

“Yes.” (If only he knew how terrible.)

“Please give greetings to her.”

“I will.”

“And welcome to you. This your first time in Ruili?”

“Actually I’ve visited the area before,” Bennie lied, “though not Ruili itself.” He didn’t know if it was detrimental to admit he was a neophyte.

“Excellent. May you have very good and happy stay with us.”

Meanwhile, both Dwight and the Shih Tzu puppy had recovered

sufficiently to be declared by Harry as having been “shooed away from death’s door.” Dwight’s face was now the color of algae. As soon as he arrived at the hotel, he crawled into his twin bed, assisted by Roxanne, who brought him a glass of boiled water, as prescribed by Dr. Harry. He took small sips, trying hard not to regurgitate, then 1 2 2

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lay down, and as Roxanne urged him to relax, he faded from
sombre
rêverie
to sound sleep.

Esmé’s purloined puppy was also in reverie. Pup-pup lay on her back, blissfully stretching her legs whenever Esmé scratched her belly. Marlena was touched by how happy her daughter was. She remembered a time in her own childhood when she had begged her father to let her keep a kitten she had found. Without a word to her, he took it from her arms, handed it to a servant, and told her to drown it; the servant, however, simply put it outside, and Marlena secretly fed it scraps for months, until one day it did not show up. Esmé was so like her. She was now coaxing the puppy to eat a watery gruel of rice and chicken, ordered by Harry and obtained by Marlena from the hotel’s kitchen staff. Marlena had reported that it was her daughter who was not feeling well and needed the special soup. A few American dollars convinced them of the veracity of this story. “Come on, Pup-pup,” Esmé said, and held the eyedropper to the Shih Tzu’s mouth, smacking her lips in further encouragement. Harry was most pleased in thinking they had become a family of sorts—for what was a family if not members of a crisis with a happy outcome?