The Story of Junk (30 page)

Taffy's call comes at seven exactly. She's down in the lobby, waiting. “Will there be three of you?”

“No,” I say, thinking of Mario. “One of us has a hangover.”

Mary and I stumble down the stairs a few minutes later, find Taffy standing by a long table dressed with a pink linen cloth, a silver coffee urn, a pyramid of china cups, and a basket of hard rolls. “I'll bet you two ladies want a bagel,” she says.

“Maybe later,” I tell her, and knock back two quick ones, nice thick dark espressos. They get the dope going, too. I ask Mary if she wants a hit before we take off, but she declines. She needs a little time. Okay by me.

Smiling, chatty, Taffy hurries us to the van parked outside, the same wood-paneled station-wagon affair that brought us in from the airport. “We're running a little late,” she explains. I look at my watch. It's three minutes past eight.

We meet the others on the tour: a retired couple from Brunei, two Chinese girls just out of high school, and a Japanese boy, a college student. Do other people find smuggling this absurd?

I wonder.

There's no sun this morning; it drizzles a little. This worries Taffy. She hopes it won't last. Some of the roads are unpaved, she tells us, and we'll have to do some walking. The van winds through the quiet streets as Taffy points out her favorite buildings, mostly temples and movie theaters. It's a pretty place, Chiang Mai, a rainbow of pastels. They call it the “Rose of the North.”

All the shops are closed at this hour; only street sweepers move about. In every neighborhood, there are small temples—
wats
—their upper reaches a cross between a minaret and a pagoda. They dot the sky same as the church spires in any provincial American town. “If you listen closely,” Taffy says, “you can hear the monks chanting.” All we hear is the car engine. We look at Taffy. “I so love that sound,” she murmurs. “So steady.”

We start up the mountain. Teak forests surround us and a lot more fresh air than I've breathed in an age. “Teak is plentiful here,” Taffy reports. “It's our major natural resource.” Mary and I exchange knowing glances.

The road, a two-lane blacktop, ropes the mountain like a lasso around a restless bull, riding up, curving, twisting, falling back. At one point we have a view of the valley below, of Chiang Mai in the distance and a few surrounding villages. Again I wonder how many are refining opium, if that's where it's done. Mary must be thinking the same thing. “So this is the Golden Triangle?” she asks.

Taffy nods and twists in her jump seat. “Some people call it that.”

A half hour later we're stopped at a roadside grocery where we change to a four-wheel-drive pickup. It's the same kind of truck we were in last night with Okay Joe, but roomier. These benches are set from one side to the other in rows. Taffy sits up front with the driver. Mary and I make small talk with the retired couple, who sit facing us. They've been all over the world, they say, everywhere but New York. In a few months they'll be in the city, where a son is engaged in business. “Where is Brunei?” I ask. I've never heard of it before.

“It's very rich,” they tell me. “Oil.”

“Our money is rich, too,” the old man says. He pulls out his wallet to show me one of the native bills. “Isn't it beautiful?”

I study the note. It's about the same size as a dollar in a Monopoly game, maybe a little smaller. The face side, engraved in blue, features a head shot of the mustachioed sultan in a fezlike cap. The flip side is mauve and shows a picture of the sultan's palace, a glorious place. “Very beautiful,” I say, handing back the bill.

“Please keep it,” the man says, closing my fingers over it. “A souvenir.”

I thank him.

He asks where in New York we live.

“Downtown,” I say.

“Is it far from Broadway?” he asks. He wants to see
Cats
. He's already seen it in London, but he wants to see it again in New York.

“Not far in miles,” I tell him. “But another world.” I light a cigarette. New York is not what I want on my mind. The old lady smiles shyly. “Our son does very well there,” she tells me in halting English. “He lives on Fifth Avenue.” She adds a few syllables to “avenue.” Mary gives me a nudge. The road in front of us narrows. No other cars pass, the woods are silent. The air thins. All I can see are clouds.

I can't believe I never knew about Brunei. There's a lot I don't know, I suppose; this is just the tip of the iceberg. I wonder why I still feel bored. At a break in the trees I look down into … nothing. A vast open space, filled with fog. This is about as far from home as I've ever been, but I'm enveloped in something so familiar it feels like I'm home in bed. Except there's no phone ringing, and no sad junkies filling my ear with how much they hate their husbands or wish their girlfriends were dead.

The truck slows. It's having trouble making it up a hill. “We're almost there,” Taffy tells us. Then the road comes to an end.

We're in a gravel parking lot at the bottom of a mountain shrouded in mist. Rising up its side, a half-mile length of stone steps (two hundred and ninety, Taffy says) has been cut through a sloping parkside dotted with fragrant flowers. It looks for all the world like the stairway to heaven. Busloads of tourists, mostly Asian families, mill around us, coming and going. Mary walks ahead of me and I watch her disappear into the ether, mingle with the crowd. Four painted stone dragons about twenty feet tall line both sides of the base of the steps, their tongues curled, their bodies a mosaic of blue and gold. The mist drops over us like a net. It makes me shiver. I can taste the dope in my throat. I feel fine.

When I catch up with Mary, we walk the temple grounds, discovering life-size stone statues painted pink, blue, and white, their arms akimbo, their hands clasped in joy, or gratitude, or pleading, in a number of ornate peak-roofed enclosures. Several small stucco chapels surround a single big one, where they keep holy relics of the Buddha. On the roof of the structure, a gold filigreed canopy reaches through the clouds in graduated measures.

“I could kiss the sky,” Mary says, staring upward.

“That tower is pure gold,” Taffy says, sliding up behind us.

“It's pretty amazing,” says Mary.

“It's all really gold?” I ask. “Not plating?”

“Gold, through and through.” Taffy laughs. “There's a lot of gold here,” she adds and drifts away. I wish I could get interested.

A few steps in front of us, squat pails filled with small gold self-stick paper squares are set around each of the painted figures that mark the pathway crossings. We watch as the Asian visitors walk up, kiss the papers, and paste them on the totems. They're prayers for good luck, we hear. I reach into a bucket and take a handful of the papers. “Can't hurt,” I say, pressing them onto the statue. I don't know any prayers. I say, “Hello.”

A gentle rain has started. Taffy looks at the sky, concern again crossing her dewy face. “This is really too bad,” she tells me. “On a clear day you can see into Laos, almost to the Mekong River.” She looks out to a point in the distance invisible to us and gives another of her sweetheart smiles. The Mekong Delta—the name always seemed so exotic to me before. Now it's empty space.

“We'll be moving on soon,” Taffy says, checking her watch again. “Ten minutes okay?” She'll be waiting at the pickup.

Mary and I walk along a path by the main temple, enfeebled by the meditative hush. A row of heavy ancient bells, each about a foot long, runs the entire length of the temple wall. They hang from a pole affixed to the wall like dancers stretching at a ballet barre. They look about ten centuries old. If we don't get out of here soon, so will I.

Back in the pickup, we start up a pebbly one-lane road, in the opposite direction from town. “Where to now?” I ask, wishing we'd brought some coffee. I've got the red balloon hidden behind a tampon in my vagina. I feel it sweat.

“A high-mountain village,” Taffy says. “You can do a little shopping there, if you like.”

“Sounds great,” I tell her, but all I really want to see is the inside of our hotel. Mary Motion sits quietly beside me, her hands twisting in her lap. “Now I wish I'd taken a little of that sample from you this morning,” she whispers in my ear. I nod in sympathy and watch the road.

“The hill people are simple but very gracious,” Taffy informs us. “They might offer you a cup of opium tea.” Mary presses an elbow to my ribs. “You don't have to drink it,” Taffy assures us. “But it's best to be polite.”

I put on my most innocent expression. “Is there
opium
here?” I do sound awed.

“Thai people are very polite,” says the woman from Brunei. “Everywhere you go. Everyone is so nice.”

“And,” her husband adds, “the women are all very beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Taffy says, her eyes twinkling.

“Thank
you,
” says the man. He puts his hands on his knees to steady himself. His wife gives him a look. The road's getting rougher.

We're in the trees, climbing yet another mountain, up and up. Again the fog and the emptiness, and the beauty. I sit very still and stare into the mist. Opium. It's out there somewhere.

The road turns to mud as we pull into the village, a collection of small thatched-roof shacks lining a rutted path that winds gently up a hill, then turns away once or twice.

“God,” says Mary, with an expression of disbelief. “It looks just like Belize in the seventies!” She used to run cocaine out of there, she tells me. She was farming marijuana, too. “It rained a lot in Belize,” she adds. “Every day, for a year.”

“It's letting up now,” Taffy chirps from the front seat. “Shall we walk?”

As we make our way up the muddy lane, I see the shacks are actually stalls for local vendors selling gemstones, textile prints, wall hangings, incense, and snacks. The whole village has a sodden carnival midway feel. Some of the vendors are dressed in traditional native peasant gear; the rest wear Western trousers and light shirts. “It's like the Burma Road,” I say, stepping over the ruts.

“We're not very far from the Burmese border”—Taffy nods—“many of the people here cross over every day to work in the fields or sell their wares. It's illegal, of course,” she says, keeping her voice low. “But it's the only way these people can eat. Most of the gem dealers are fakes,” she lets on. “Later I'll take you to the ones selling genuine stones. Anyone who tries to sell you stones in the street is taking you for a ride.”

Even as she says this, a twenty-something boy in a plaid shirt approaches, several strings of beads slung from his arm. He shows us a tin paintbox in his hand. Inside are a number of tiny stones—rubies, sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, pearls. He insists they're real and that they're not stolen, says we can trust him. He quotes a few prices, neither high nor low. Over the boy's shoulder I see Taffy wave us away.

Soon we're standing before a house at the top of the hill. It has a decrepit fence around it, and sits awkwardly on a rise just above the road. It appears to be sinking in our direction. Two chickens pace the yard; two roosters scratch the ground nearby. Loosely woven baskets are perched like hats on the weather-beaten stakes of the fence. A couple of paper lanterns dangle from the roof. Taffy brings us around the far side, where a woman who could be thirty or fifty is sitting on a porch step. According to my guidebook, she's wearing a traditional Meo-tribe hat over her black blouse and embroidered black skirt. We watch as she paints a piece of linen with a quill-type brush, making rows of delicate symbols. Several children surround her. Taffy makes small talk, then motions us inside.

“What are we doing?” I ask her.

“I thought you might like to see how the people here live.”

“Okay,” I say. But it isn't.

It takes a minute to adjust to the gloom inside, one room on a dirt floor. Smoldering wood sits in a hole dug in the middle of the room, under a makeshift stove. A large, heavily encrusted wok sits over the heat on a piece of thin metal. A few pots and a couple of enamel bowls lie on a sad wooden counter beside it. “This is the kitchen,” Taffy says as if we were visiting the Grand Palais. “Feel free to look around.”

I want to run out the door. It's embarrassing, gawking at the poor woman this way. What can we say? “Oh, how clever”? “How lovely”? “How delicious”? There's primitive plumbing in a corner by a rusting sink and, behind a hanging blanket, a couple of mats for beds. Long drapes of thin cotton plaid hang over the windows. Maybe there's glass there but I don't think so. There's no place to sit, except on the ground, and nothing to do about any of it.

Mary and I slip back outside while the others examine the even darker corners of the room. “It's really exactly like Belize,” she says. “I can't get over it.”

Behind the shack, we spot a chimney sort of structure in the ground. It might be a kiln, or an incinerator. It might be an opium refinery, too. I bend and take a sniff, hoping to catch the familiar odor, but all I find is mud and a few fallen leaves. Not the season, I guess. I pick up a twig and poke through the leaves. Mary watches me with amusement. “Anything in there?” she asks.

“I can't tell,” I admit. “I don't think so.” I glance down the hill toward the village. In one of these rude huts, someone is refining heroin and I want to know where. I just want to …
know
.

We go back and join the others. They're waiting on the porch, wondering what we've been up to. “Just looking around,” I say.

We thank the peasant woman and saunter down the road past two groups of German tourists. Taffy shepherds us into the shelter of a gem dealer she says is genuine. In a minute my hands are filled with tiny pink rubies. I stare at them. So tiny. They look like candy but better, harder. I put them back on the dealer's table, where small pieces of raw jade, emeralds, and other stones are on display. I notice the scale. It's exactly like mine. It gets me thinking about the border guards again. I can't spend money here … and I can't walk away empty-handed. I pick out a couple of unpolished black star sapphires. The dealer weighs them in the scale—twenty dollars, she says. I buy them. Taffy approves, though she wonders why I don't take a few rubies, too. She points out larger examples. I see she's something of a shill for these people. I wonder if she takes kickbacks.