Part 2 (2/2)

Yes, he does. We have stood on common ground. We have shared communion flesh. Once a month, a Chinese priest used to come to the camp and celebrate ma.s.s with a hunk of maggoty man to, but he never made me feel one with anyone, let alone G.o.d.

The blood bathes my lips. The liver is succulent and bursting with juices.

Perhaps this is the first person I've ever loved.

The feeling lasts a few minutes. But then comes the hunger, swooping down on me, clawed and ravenous. It will never go away, not completely.

They have called in an exorcist to pray over the railway tracks. The mother of the girl they found there has become a nun, and she stands on the gravel pathway lamenting her karma. The most recent victim has few to grieve for her. I overhear Detective Jed talking to my mother. He tells her there are two killers. The second victim had her throat cut and her internal organs removed--the first one was strangled, completely different. He's been studying these cases, these ritual killers, in American psychiatry books. And the cowherd has an alibi for the first victim.

I'm only half-listening to Jed, who drones on and on about famous mad killers in Europe: the butcher of Hanover, Jack the Ripper. How their victims were always chosen in a special way. How they killed over and over, always a certain way, a ritual. How they always got careless after a whilst, because part of what they were doing came from a hunger, a desperate need to be found out. How after a whilst they might leave clues, confide in someone. How he thought he had one of these cases on his hands, but the authorities in Bangkok weren't buying the idea. The village of Thapsakae just wasn't grand enough to play host to a reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.

I listen to him, but I've never been to Europe, and it's all just talk to me. I'm much more interested in the exorcist, who's a Brahmin in white robes, hair down to his feet, all nappy and filthy, a dozen flower garlands around his neck and amulets tinkling all over him.

”The killer might confide in someone,” says Jed, ”someone he thinks is in no position to betray him, someone perhaps too simpleminded to understand. Remember, the killer doesn't know he's evil. In a sense, he really can't help himself. He doesn't think the way we think. To himself, he's an innocent.”

The exorcist enters his trance and sways and mumbles in unknown tongues. The villagers don't believe the killer's an innocent. They want to lynch him.

Women was.h.i.+ng clothes find a young girl's hand bobbing up and down, and her head a few yards downstream. Women are panicking in the marketplace. They're lynching Indians, Chinese, anyone alien. But not Si Ui; he's a simpleton, after all. The village idiot is immune from persecution because every village needs an idiot.

The exorcist gets quite a workout, capturing spirits in baskets and jars.

Meanwhilst, Si Ui has become the trusted jek, the one who cuts the gailan in the fields and never cheats anyone of their two-saleung bundle of Chinese broccoli.

I keep his secret. Evenings, after I'm exhausted from swimming all day with Sombun and Lek, or lazing on the back of a water buffalo, I go to the rubber orchard and catch birds as the sun sets. I'm almost as good as he is now. Sometimes he says nothing, though he'll share with me a piece of meat, cooked or uncooked; sometimes he talks up a storm. When he talks pidgin, he sounds like he's a half-wit. When he talks Thai, it's the same way, I think. But when he goes on and on in his Hakka dialect, he's as lucid as they come. I think. I'm only getting it in patches.

One day he says to me, ”The young ones taste the best because it's the taste of childhood. You and I, we have no childhood. Only the taste.”

A bird flies onto his shoulder, head tilted, chirps a friendly song. Perhaps he will soon be dinner.

Another day, Si Ui says, ”Children's livers are the sweetest, they're bursting with young life. I weep for them. They're with me always. They're my friends. Like you.”

Around us, paradise is crumbling. Everyone suspects someone else. Fights are breaking out in the marketplace. One day it's the Indians, another day the c.h.i.n.ks, the Burmese. Hatred hangs in the air like the smell of rotten mangoes.

And Si Ui is getting hungrier.

My mother is working on her book now, thinking it'll make her fortune; she waits for the mail, which gets here sometimes by train, sometimes by oxcart. She's waiting for some letter from Simon and Schuster. It never comes, but she's having a ball, in her own way. She stumbles her way through the language, commits appalling solecisms, points her feet, even touches a monk one time, a total sacrilege...but they let her get away with everything. Farangs, after all, are touched by a divine madness. You can expect nothing normal from them.

She questions every villager, pores over every clue. It never occurs to her to ask me what I know.

We glut ourselves on papaya and curried catfish.

”Nicholas,” my mother tells me one evening after she's offered me a hit of opium, her latest affectation, ”this really is the Garden of Eden.”

I don't tell her that I've already met the serpent.

Here's how the day of reckoning happened, Corey: It's mid-morning and I'm wandering aimlessly. My mother has taken the train to Bangkok with Detective Jed. He's decided that her untouchable farang-ness might get him an audience with some major official in the police department. I don't see my friends at the river or in the marketplace. But it's not planting season, and there's no school. So I'm playing by myself, but you can only flip so many pebbles into the river and tease so many water buffaloes.

After a whilst I decide to go and look for Sombun. We're not close, he and I, but we're thrown together a lot; things don't seem right without him.

I go to Sombun's house; it's a shabby place, but immaculate, a row house in the more ”citified” part of the village, if you can call it that. Sombun's mother is making chili paste, pounding the spices in a stone mortar. You can smell the sweet basil and the lemongra.s.s in the air. And the betel nut, too. She's chewing on the intoxicant; her teeth are stained red-black from long use.

”Oh,” she says, ”the farang boy.”

”Where's Sombun?”

She doesn't know quite what to make of my Thai, which has been getting better for months. ”He's not home, Little Mouse,” she says. ”He went to the jek's house to buy broccoli. Do you want to eat?”

”I've eaten, thanks, auntie,” I say, but for politeness' sake I'm forced to nibble on bright green sali pastry.

”He's been gone a long time,” she says, as she pounds. ”I wonder if the c.h.i.n.k's going to teach him to catch birds.”

”Birds?”

And I start to get this weird feeling. Because I'm the one who catches birds with the Chinaman, I'm the one who's shared his past, who understands his hunger. Not just any kid.

”Sombun told me the c.h.i.n.k was going to show him a special trick for catching them. Something about putting yourself into a deep state of samadhi, reaching out with your mind, plucking the life-force with your mind. It sounds very spiritual, doesn't it? I always took the c.h.i.n.k for a moron, but maybe I'm misjudging him; Sombun seems to do a much better job,” she says. ”I never liked it when they came to our village, but they do work hard.”

Well, when I leave Sombun's house, I'm starting to get a little mad. It's jealousy, of course, childish jealousy; I see that now. But I don't want to go there and disrupt their little bird-catching session. I'm not a spoilsport. I'm just going to pace up and down by the side of the klong, doing a slow burn.

The serpent came to me! I was the only one who could see through his madness and his pain, the only one who truly knew the hunger that drove him! That's what I'm thinking. And I go back to tossing pebbles, and I tease the gibbon chained by the temple's gate, and I kick a water buffalo around. And, before I know it, this twinge of jealousy has grown into a kind of rage. It's like I'm one of those birds, only in a really big cage, and I've been flying and flying and thinking I'm free, and now I've banged into the prison bars for the first time. I'm so mad I could burst.

I'm playing by myself by the railway tracks when I see my mom and the detective walking out of the station. And that's the last straw. I want to hurt someone. I want to hurt my mom for shutting me out and letting strangers into her mosquito net at night. I want to punish Jed for thinking he knows everything. I want someone to notice me.

So that's when I run up to them and I say, ”I'm the one! He confided in me! You said he was going to give himself away to someone and it was me, it was me!”

My mom just stares at me, but Jed becomes very quiet. ”The Chinaman?” he asks me.

I say, ”He told me children's livers are the sweetest. I think he's after Sombun.” I don't tell him that he's only going to teach Sombun to catch birds, that he taught me, too, that boys are safe from him because like the detective told us, we're not the special kind of victim he seeks out. ”In his house, in the rubber orchard, you'll find everything,” I say. ”Bones. He makes the feet into a stew,” I add, improvising now, because I've never been inside that house. ”He cuts off their faces and dries them on a jerky rack. And Sombun's with him.”

The truth is, I'm just making trouble. I don't believe there are dried faces in the house or human bones. I know Sombun's going to be safe, that Si Ui's only teaching him how to squeeze the life force from the birds, how to blunt the ancient hunger. Him instead of me. They're not going to find anything but dead birds.

There's a scream. I turn. I see Sombun's mother with a basket of fish, coming from the market. She's overheard me, and she cries, ”The c.h.i.n.k is killing my son!” Faster than thought, the street is full of people, screaming their anti-c.h.i.n.k epithets and pulling out butcher's knives. Jed's calling for reinforcements. Street vendors are tightening their phakhomas around their waists.

”Which way?” Jed asks, and suddenly I'm at the head of an army, racing full tilt toward the rubber orchard, along the neon green of the young rice paddies, beside the ca.n.a.ls teeming with catfish, through thickets of banana trees, around the walls of the old temple, through the fields of gailan...and this, too, feeds my hunger. It's ugly. He's a Chinaman. He's the village idiot. He's different. He's an alien. Anything is possible.

We're converging on the gailan field now. They're waving sticks. Harvesting sickles. Fishknives. They're shouting, ”Kill the c.h.i.n.k, kill the c.h.i.n.k.” Sombun's mother is shrieking and wailing, and Detective Jed has his gun out. Tae Pak, the village rich man, is vainly trying to stop the mob from trampling his broccoli. The army is unstoppable. And I'm their leader. I brought them here with my little lie. Even my mother is finally in awe.

I push through the bamboo thicket and we're standing in the clearing in the rubber orchard. They're screaming for the jek's blood. And I'm screaming with them.

Si Ui is nowhere to be found. They're beating on the ground now, slicing it with their scythes, smas.h.i.+ng their clubs against the trees. Sombun's mother is hysterical. The other women have caught her mood, and they're all screaming, because someone is holding up a sandal...Sombun's.

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