I dropped down on the rock-hard mattress and heard the bathroom
door close, then the slight, rustling sounds of disrobing as my brain spun around where I lay still on a pillow. Then there was the splash of water dropping weakly to the floor, echoing around the bathroom tile, the tinkling puncturing the throbbing static building in my ear-drums, the music from the bar pumping a hard bass that vibrated in my chest but I barely heard as my head swam away from sentience.
DAWN IN
downtown Mae Sot was hollow.
Htan Dah and I opened our room door onto gray, lonely streets. We wound our way back home through the slight chill, past muted steel-pot clangings of preparing street vendors who moved quick but not hurriedly, the smell of the beginnings of humidity and char. My forehead pounded something fierce, and I squinted against even the ashen light.
“I kind of feel like I’m doing a walk of shame,” I said.
Htan Dah looked at me with expectant confusion, waiting for me to explain.
“It’s when you walk home by yourself after partying too hard and sleeping somewhere you shouldn’t have. Like, you smell bad, and you’re hungover, and tired, and look like shit, and it’s too early to be on the street.”
Htan Dah nodded thoughtfully. “So,” he said solemnly, after a moment. “This is my first walk of shame.”
I tipped my aching head back, opening my mouth and throat up to laughter. “Well, no. I’m pretty sure you have to have sex to have a walk of shame. And you’re supposed to be, like, carrying your underwear in your pocket.”
It was Saturday, the Saturday before the Tuesday I was leaving, which meant that that night was the night of the long-awaited and emphatically promised party I was to throw at Office Two. The sky was warmer and oranger by the time Htan Dah and I somewhat staggered back into our house, and my exhaustion and nausea had advanced to the point where I was daunted by even what little I had to do before
the sun set again: prepare for more drinking, mainly. Also, procure enough food and booze to satisfy a houseful of twenty-year-old men expecting to party their faces off. Also, as I’d invited Htan Dah as my ride and escort, help fulfill his dinner duties for Office One before we left. Which was what we were doing, later, when Ta Mla burst into the dining room/garage, angrier than I’d ever seen him, gesturing agitatedly and spewing a storm of pissed-off Karen.
“I hate them!” he exploded after an extended tirade in his first language. He looked at me and explained in shaking and broken English that a cop standing by the side of the road had waved him over as Ta Mla rode past on his bicycle. He’d just been going out for some exercise, and he’d even bought one of the yellow fabric “We Love the King” wristbands after the last time he’d been arrested, in an effort to better blend in with the Thais. No dice.
“That policeman,” Ta Mla seethed, grasping his stomach, “he knows me very well.” Indeed he did; it was the same guy who’d arrested him two weeks before. This time, Ta Mla had been cashless and alone, and the officer had, whether out of cruelty, or boredom, or both, made him sit handcuffed on the curb when Ta Mla couldn’t produce the papers the cop knew he didn’t have. He let Ta Mla sweat it out there for an hour or so before allowing him to call a coworker who could bring the $5 bribe that would set him free. And Ta Mla, sweet, subtle, terrorist-boot-camp-dropout Ta Mla, swore now, in the dining room/ garage, “If I had a hand grenade, I would explode him.”
Htan Dah had paused his chili-paste pounding to watch Ta Mla, the marble pestle impotent in his hand while he listened to him. When Ta Mla finally stalked off into the house, Htan Dah went back to gently slamming the tool into the mortar, his head bent low over his task, his hair hanging toward the table.
After a minute, he started chuckling.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He looked up, smiling. “Ta Mla is so mad,” he said, chuckling some more.
I shook my head. Just the hollering had made my heart beat faster and my stomach clench. “Did he say who brought him the money?”
“Yes, it was Walt. You know, Walt was arrested today, too. Earlier than Ta Mla. He had to pay Thai police twice today.”
Walt had briefly been a student in my advanced class, but his duties in the organization and at Office Two had soon necessitated his attrition. I liked Walt, and not just because he went by an easy-to-pronounce nickname and had issued a hearty “Hello!” that brought me nearly to relieved tears on one of my first days, when most everyone else was ignoring me and their own English abilities. He had a lanky, self-conscious shuffle. He loved math and listened to English self-study CDs. When he’d read aloud his writing exercise in class one day, it had been about how he worried that he’d never find a girlfriend because he was ugly.
“Hey, pal,” I said when I encountered his big, shy smile at Office Two later that night. “I heard you had an exciting day.” Htan Dah and I had come bearing heavy plastic bags on our fingers, the favors we’d hustled around town accumulating after Office One had been fed. Walt stood chatting with me, with his head tipped and shoulders stooped, in the way of a person who isn’t comfortable in his height, while Htan Dah and I opened our bags and unleashed a mighty party spread on the floor.
“Yes,” Walt said. He laughed. “Very busy today.”
“How come you got away so easily, when Ta Mla needed you to rescue him?”
“Ta Mla doesn’t speak Thai. Me, I speak some Thai, so I just talked to the policeman, very calm.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Hey, friend, why don’t you go buy yourself some whiskey?’ I just hand him five hundred baht. And he just”—Walt waved the back of his hand, as if he were swatting a fly away from his face—“let me go.”
“Wow, Walt. You offered him money before he even asked you for it?”
Htan Dah laughed. “Walt is very smooth talker.”
Walt laughed again, too, his giant teeth gleaming at us. You’d never guess, looking at him, talking to him, that he used to be a dedicated warmonger.
WALT WAS
born a soldier, of a soldier. He’d lived in a KNU base camp until it was attacked, when he was five, and his mother took him to Huay Kaloke. They moved to another camp, Maw Ker, before Huay Kaloke was burned down, though ultimately that camp was burned down, too. When he was ten, his father was killed in battle. When he was sixteen, he enlisted.
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By then, Walt had seen a lot of fighting and fleeing, and he wanted revenge.
By the time Walt was out of boot camp and stalking the jungle with an AK-47, Manerplaw had fallen, Four Cuts had ravaged thousands of villages, the DKBA had robbed the KNU of much of its land and border-tax income, and the rebel fighters were tired, their numbers and munitions depleted. They sometimes supplemented their ammunition with homemade gunpowder: bat shit plus mango-wood charcoal plus sulfur. But Walt didn’t need ample supplies and backup to love being at war; he had plenty of anger to fuel him through two years of long, jungle-tramping days, little food, and little assurance that shooting at his enemies through the trees was making any difference.
When he was eighteen, his brigade fell. When his commander
bailed and the rations ran out, he moved to Bangkok with seven other soldiers. They worked as housepainters on a six-month contract, living in a tin shed they’d built out of scrap. The illegal immigrants were supposed to be paid when the contract was up. They weren’t. “It’s better to die than become a slave,” Walt told his comrades, and with that, he rejoined the Karen guerrillas, the fourth brigade, which eventually became better known to the world as God’s Army.
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For two months in the late ’90s, Walt continued fighting in the jungle, alongside Jesus-loving kids with assault weapons. When he went to visit family in a refugee camp at age nineteen, his uncle was a little concerned for Walt’s future. Learn first, he told him. Then decide if you still want to fight after that. So Walt moved into camp, finished high school, and quit his military career for good.
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He’d joined BA as a village organizer, he said, so he could fight for freedom, justice, and peace—the same nonviolent ideals for which he’d previously been fighting, only violently. Unlike his coworkers, who hadn’t actually been to war, Walt’s hero wasn’t Che, but Gandhi. He’d said to me in all earnestness once that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. And he aspired to his icon’s stamina. “Wars are between armies,” he’d told me when I asked him if he
was thinking of resettling. “What about all the people in between? People can change the situation on the ground. Don’t forget the people. Get them involved in the resistance. I think I can do many things here. If I resettle, I will start my life again. I’ll think about myself there, not my people, which is what I need to do. If you have a family, they come first. But I want to get married, and my children can take on responsibility to fight. I’ll still fight, too. When I get old, I’ll be teacher or trainer or writer. Even if I get married, I won’t give up.”
Walt sat next to me when everyone settled in a circle around the party goods in the middle of the Office Two floor. Htan Dah and I presided over the display proudly, our backs straight as we sat Indian-style while the guests surveyed what we had brought. Roti from the joint across from the mosque, stuffed with meat and vegetables. Bags of potato chips, which my coworkers for some reason considered an estimable treat. Thai noodles and curries in street vendors’ plastic bags. Enough Chang beer to kill a man. Ice. Two bottles of hard-found, “charcoal filtered,” “imported from Kentucky” vodka that cost nearly as much as everything else combined. Orange juice—also a rare and expensive commodity—because the boys wanted to try a screwdriver like a white person might order out, and because only a fool, or an addict, would drink this low-quality vodka straight.
We broke into the food with our fingers and a few communal spoons. We cracked open the Chang and the vodka. I mixed drinks and handed them around, though not to Saw Kaw, with the hepatitis, and raised my glass and made everyone raise their glasses and said “Cheers,” and everyone repeated after me and after much clinking of cups, we started drinking.
HTAN DAH
was flushed and through his screwdriver first.
“You really sucked that down,” I said.
He nodded at me once, pink and smiling and glassy.
“Are you ready for another?”
He nodded again, still smiling.
I held out my hand. “Okay. Give me your motorbike keys. You know we’re not driving home if you’re getting wasted.”
Htan Dah just kept looking at me and smiling.
This issue had been something of an upset between us, and between me and everyone else at BA, in the aftermath of the dog-meat party, from which Abby and I had taken the long walk home together because of Htan Dah’s liberal imbibing of whiskey and herbal tonic. He was sitting on the floor of the upstairs landing when I finally got back to the house that night, and asked me how my walk had been, with some attitude. Ultimately, I asked him what the hell his problem was, and he hollered at me that I was afraid that he’d topple the motorbike, that I didn’t go with him because I thought he was unreliable. When I heard the hurt quake in his voice, I explained my thoroughly impersonal aversion to drinking and driving, that I thought he was an excellent driver but never let anyone who’d been drinking drive me anywhere, ever. But I’d made no such progress with anyone else in my White Girls Against Drunk Driving campaign. Htan Dah always said that in a Karen family, women were in charge,
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but I was outnumbered, and even in this woman-respecting culture, my questioning Htan Dah’s ability to operate a motorbike under the influence of alcohol was out of line.
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We two held each other’s gaze in the moment of shocked silence after I’d
demanded the keys, before the inevitable eruption of protest came fierce and flurrying around the room.
“What?!” several of his comrades started yelling at once.
“We are excellent drivers!”
“Whether he is drunk or not, it does not affect his driving!”
“You cannot say to him that he cannot drive a motorbike!”
I parted the verbal melee with hard shaking of my head. “No. No. Drunk drivers are more likely to get in accidents. Period. This is not up for discussion. It’s completely idiotic.”
“We know what we’re doing.”
“Maybe for you, you cannot drive a motorbike when you are drunk. But for us, it is no problem.”
“It is stupid to walk.”
“You’re stupid!”
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I yelled. “And if you think a bunch of drunk guys are going to pressure me into riding around on a motorbike at night in Thailand with another drunk guy, you’ve got the wrong fucking girl.”
Htan Dah stayed out of it, never pitching in a word as the boys and I fought on, until I lost interest in arguing something so ridiculous and turned my attention back to him. “Htan Dah,” I said, reaching out my upturned palm again. “Give me your keys.”
The shouting died down as he locked me with eyes friendly but unwavering. After a moment, he reached into his pocket, pulled his keys out, and handed them over, and a cry went up all around us.
“ENGLISH, YOU
guys,” I said. There were snatches of Karen conversation here and there, always, particularly among the guys who didn’t speak much English, like That Khaing, but everyone was getting lazier as they got drunker, and it was becoming the dominant mode of discourse. “While I’m still here. If I’m going to get you all drunk, you’re at least going to practice your English.”
“Yes!” Walt backed me up, his voice just a little louder under the influence, but as smooth and soothing as ever. “English. So, we will make a rule.”
“Yes,” Saw Kaw echoed. “You must speak only English. Or else ...” He considered for a moment. “You must . . . take off your pants.”
It was so agreed.