Saving Fish From Drowning (27 page)

But now some three hours had passed, the last half-hour in cold, 1 8 3

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sweating pain. Bennie had forgotten about humanity and pickles.

His mind was devoted fully to the perturbations of his bowels. Another cramp shot through his intestines, and he rode the waves by pressing down harder on his knee, which in turn placed an equivalent pressure on the pink bag. It burst with an audible pop, and the fermented turnips and pungent juice splashed on the floor, sending into the confined bus cabin a smell not unlike that of the entrails of a rat floating in a sewer. That is how the others would have described it, had they not already been gagging and vomiting.

As for myself, I have always been fond of pickled turnips. They are excellent in all manner of home-style dishes, a welcome bit of crunch in a bowl of morning rice porridge, which had once been my fond custom.

IT WAS NOT until their arrival at the hotel that Harry was missed.

Walter began to collect passports. Eleven? Why were there only eleven? He glanced about, trying to match faces to passports. Mr.

Joe was busy unloading luggage from the hold, and the passengers were pointing out the pieces that belonged to them. All the men had canvas duffels, though one of Bennie’s bags was a fake Gucci in leatherette. The women had a preference for expandable wheelies, decorated with bright bunches of yarn that would make a surreptitious luggage thief look elsewhere. Heidi was passing out antibiotics from her bountiful supply.

“Two pills a day for three days,” she said. “If it’s the usual kind of mild dysentery, you’ll find relief by morning. Be sure to drink plenty of boiled water.” Moff, Rupert, Marlena, and Bennie nodded weakly, accepting the pills like dying Catholics getting their final holy wafers.

Ah, Harry! That’s who it was, Walter decided. Harry Bailley had not yet given him his passport.

“Has anyone seen Harry?” Walter asked.

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The travelers were annoyed. They didn’t want anything to delay their getting settled in their rooms. They assumed Harry had sprinted off to take a leak in the dark. “Harry!” Moff called out. “Harry, you bastard, get your arse over here!” They all cast their eyes about, expecting to see him jump out of the bushes.

To their left was a gigantic neon sign that said “Golden Land Guesthouse.” Below was another neon graphic, a menorah. My

friends were so exhausted by illness and travel they did not even notice this odd decorative touch. The guesthouse was a two-story colonial affair that might have provided genteel hospitality in an earlier time. It had the requisite rickety staircase, shabby, with threadbare stained red carpet. The innkeepers were an ethnic Chinese couple who claimed to be Jews. They boasted that they were descended from the lost tribes who wandered into this part of Asia from Mediterranea more than a thousand years earlier, some of whom migrated farther north to Kaifeng. They even possessed a Haggadah written in both Chinese and Hebrew.

Let me hasten to add that the fact that the owners were Chinese did not figure into why I chose the guesthouse. There simply were no other choices to speak of, that is, none with private bathrooms. The privacy that these bathrooms afforded, however, was more visual than real. The walls were flimsy pressboard, the punch-through kind you find on the Hollywood sets of cowboy westerns with saloon fights. A person sneezing or producing other involuntary body emissions would send the walls rattling to near collapse, and the corporeal sounds would echo one floor up and down, as well as to the ends of each hall.

It was in these reverberating echo chambers that my friends sought refuge. Walter managed to register them all as guests, despite Harry’s continuing and now worrisome absence. Actually, only Walter was concerned. The others assumed Harry was chasing after an exotic bird, or sitting at the bar, having an exotic cocktail. But Walter had 1 8 5

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seen Wendy climb out with the strings of her ridiculous conical hat clutched in her fingers. That’s when he said to himself,
Number
twelve
.

What had led him to make such a mistake? As soon as the question formed in his mind, he knew. Miss Chen, the Nat. Trouble was starting already. The sickness, the missing passenger.

Don’t be ridiculous, I shouted, but to no avail. I wasn’t a Nat. Or was I? Insane people often don’t know they are insane. Did I not know I was a Nat? I would have to find a way to prove I was not.

The sun had set. The temperature was sixty-five degrees. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Walter said, “please adjust your watches back to seven. We are ninety minutes different from China.” My friends were too sick to do so.

“Those who wish to eat,” Walter said, “should meet in the dining hall at eight. That is one hour from now. When you have finished your meal, those among you who are brave souls may wish to stop in the lounge, where you can sing with the locals. I hear they have quite a good karaoke system.”

Walter left them and met Mr. Joe back at the bus, where he had told him to wait. The driver had a cloth soaked in lime juice covering the lower part of his face. He had spent the last twenty minutes furiously cleaning the bus of vomit and stinks, and had left all of the windows open.

Walter announced that they were going back to where they had made a rest stop. “Do you think you can recognize the place?”

The driver nervously ran his fingers through his hair. “Yes, yes, of course. Forty-five minutes, that way.” And he jerked his head toward the pitch-black road.

Walter was thinking that Harry might have fallen. Perhaps he was drunk. With past tour groups, there had been troublesome clients like that. He might also be sick like the others, too weak to walk.

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“Slow down when we near the place,” Walter said. “He could be lying along the road.”

With tremendous bravery, the driver started the engine. He would find the exact spot, all right. It was where the Nat had come riding toward him on a white horse, near the clump of jacarandas. No doubt about it, the Nat had snatched Harry. They would be lucky if they found him at all. And if they did and tried to take him from the Nat, there would be trouble to pay. Before he put the bus in gear, Mr.

Joe leaned over to Walter’s side and opened the glove compartment, where he kept his emergency supplies. Inside was a small dollhouselike structure, heavily carved, with an elaborate roof whose eaves curved up like my Persian slippers. It was a miniature Nat shrine. He made an offering of a cigarette, pushing it into a tiny door.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AWAY, Harry was trying to explain to the two military-garbed policemen why he was alone, wandering on a deserted stretch of the Burma Road at night. The younger one had his rifle pointed toward him. “ID,” the older and stouter one demanded, using one of the few English terms he knew. The muzzle of his rifle moved slightly, like a sniffing wild dog.

Harry fumbled at his pocket. Was it good or bad to show an

American passport? He had read once that in certain countries, it was a badge of honor. In others, it was an invitation to be shot. In those cases, pamphlets had warned, when asked for your nationality, say Canadian and smile jovially.

Perhaps he should explain that he was born in England. “British, British,” he could say. “UK.” It was the truth. But then, he realized, many Burmese had bad feelings about the British colonialists of yesteryear. The police might view his British origins as reason to pummel him into mincemeat, and then they’d continue the beating 1 8 7

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for his being American as well. All right, then, forget mentioning the British birthplace. He was sweating though the air was cool. What had he read about the military police? There were stories about people who protested against the government and were then made to disappear. What did they do to foreigners who crossed them? What were those human rights groups always making a noise about?

The younger, taller policeman grabbed the passport from Harry and looked at the blue front with gold letters, then inspected the photo. Then both policemen eyed Harry critically. The photo had been taken seven years before, when his hair was still dark and his jowl line more taut. The shorter policeman shook his head and grunted what sounded to Harry like a pronouncement that they should kill the foreigner and be done with it. Actually, he was cursing his colleague for leaving the liquor bottle in the pitch-black field.

The younger policeman flipped though the pages, examining the various entry and exit stamps, to England, to the United States, to France with a new fling, to Bali with another, to Canada to ski at Whistler, to Bermuda to give a talk to a wealthy dog-fanciers’ club, to England again, which was when his mum, a difficult woman who had hated every woman he had ever dated, was diagnosed with cancer. She refused all treatment, saying she wanted to go with dignity.

After that, he made a trip to Australia and New Zealand for his doggie seminars. Then it was England, England, guilt-laden England, the last not for his mother’s funeral but for her birthday, celebrated with the knowledge that there was no more evidence of the cancer. It was a bloody miracle. In fact, it was never cancer but only swollen lymph nodes, and she had just assumed it was the worst possible thing, because that was the kind of luck she had always had, she said. Harry had prepared himself for her death so well that he even made promises of all kinds to her, knowing he would never have to keep them. Now she was calling in the chips, reminding him that he had said he had always wanted to take her on a safari in Africa and 1 8 8

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do a special on wild dogs for his show with her providing commentary! Let’s do it, she said. Good Lord! And now, perhaps there would be no African special to worry about. There would be no Harry after this. He pictured his mum weeping, saying she always had such bad luck, the bad luck to have had a son who was killed in Burma in a stupid misunderstanding about a passport.

The older policeman finally found the stamp for Myanmar immigration, punched at Muse just that morning. He showed it to his partner. They seemed to relax their grips on their rifles. The muzzle went down, and Harry wanted to cry with relief. He heard the older one utter a question. In doing his best at universal communication, Harry began to pantomime walking along the road, minding his own business, then the bus making
v-v-v-rroom
sounds. He sprinted in place, grabbed his knee, pointed to the ditch, and rubbed his shoulder. The policemen growled at each other in Burmese: “This foreign fool must be drunker than we are.”

“Where were you going?” the taller policeman asked Harry in

Burmese, which, of course, Harry did not understand. The stouter man snapped open a map and ordered Harry to point to his destination. What Harry saw looked like a treasure map for underground ants, a maze of trickling syrupy paths leading to seismographic tracings. Even if he had been able to read the map, he realized now he had no idea where the group was headed. That was the beauty of tour groups, wasn’t it? You did not have to do a whit of planning.

You went without any of the responsibilities of the trip: none of the transfers, the bookings, the hotels, the distances between them, or the time it would take to reach the next one. Of course, before he left San Francisco, he had reviewed the itinerary simply to see what delights awaited him. But who could remember the names of cities in a language he couldn’t pronounce? Mandalay, that was the only place he recalled he would visit.

“Look,” Harry said, trying again. “The guide is named Walter.

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Waaahlll-tuh. And the bus says ‘Golden Land Tour.’ I was walking and fell, see? Boom!” He pointed to the ditch again, then to his shoulder and the red dirt smudged on his crisp white shirt. “And the bus, it went:
Vrrrooom!
” He stood on one foot, as if hailing a taxi. Wait, wait, stop, stop.” He placed his hand over his brow, watching the imaginary bus disappear into oblivion, leaving him in this terrible predicament. He huffed and said, “Off they went. Bye-bye, shitheads.”

“Shithead?” the younger man said, and started to laugh. He mumbled something to his partner, and they guffawed like madmen.

Harry recognized his cue. Years of studying animal behavior came into play. Observation. Analysis. Hypothesis: They recognized the American expletive. Like all young men, they loved these words. Of course they did. A love of cusswords was part of the chromosomal makeup of the male brain, no matter what race. Now all Harry needed to do was positively reinforce any glimmer of desired social behavior stemming from that response, and keep it coming.

When the men stopped chortling, Harry nodded and pointed

down the highway. “Shitheads went that way. Me, here.” He shook his head. “And they took off and left me here.” With you two dickheads, he added to himself.

Five minutes later, Harry was walking with the young policemen to their command post, a small shack at the intersection of two roads. Since passage beyond checkpoints stopped at six p.m., there was no traffic to monitor. Once there, Harry had to rev himself up again to do the expletive routine with the new audience, two senior policemen. After much conviviality, Harry brought out a wad of bills and asked if it was possible to hire a car.

“Taxi?” he asked, with feigned innocence, as if one could summon a taxi in the middle of nowhere. “Taxi go zoom-zoom, down this road.” “Taxi” was a word the men understood, as was Harry’s leaving the booty on the table. They pointed to their police car outside.

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They pointed to Harry, then to the two of them, and nodded. They spoke magnanimously in Burmese about ensuring Harry’s safe return. The map was laid on the table near the money. They burst into rapid discussion about a careful plan of action that resembled a military deployment: “We take this route, you see, heading due south from latitude . . . Hey, what’s our latitude?”