“Just want to do a perimeter check.”
He walked off. She was fine for a moment, very relaxed, until she saw a python move from under a piece of wall and slither off into the jungle. All her peace gone in an instant.
She thought about the dead men in the swamp and was irritated that she hadn’t taken the time to find one of their weapons. Right now, being unarmed increased her sense of vulnerability with Porter out of sight.
She thought for a moment about what just happened between them, then dismissed it and focused on her surrounds.
When Porter returned he came from another direction and so quiet she didn’t see him until he was there.
“Nothing out there doesn’t belong as far as I can tell,” Porter said. “Let’s get some rest.”
“I won’t sleep,” she said. I got a little rest on the river and now I’m wide awake. You go first.”
She didn’t have to beg. He handed her his gun, then settled against a piece of wall after checking that no unwanted residents were behind or around it.
He closed his eyes.
At first he just seemed to be resting. But then his breathing grew heavy and she realized he’d fallen asleep. She watched him, and listened to the world around her and remained wide awake as morning grew stronger in the canopy above them, shafts of light spearing to the ground in places.
She could now see much more of the ancient ruins. It had obviously been stripped of portable valuables, but even so, what remained and where it was, fascinated her.
She tried not to think about emotions. No time to get stupid. They fucked. Stress relief. Let it go. She laughed at herself. The man was good at things out here. Good at killing, trekking, saving dolphins, with females.
But there was no longevity in any relationship with a guy like Porter Vale and that was just fine.
She let him sleep for a couple hours. She just ruminated, thinking about what it was like five hundred years or so ago. And then something got her attention in the jungle. It sounded like a low cough.
Kiera reached over to Porter and gently shook his shoulder.
He opened his eyes. She pointed and whispered, “I heard what I think was a cough.”
“Probably Narith coming back.”
He got up, took his Glock from her and motioned for her to follow him. They moved quickly away from the pagoda and into the jungle and there crouched and waited. He used gestures to get her to sit looking the opposite way in case something might come from the other directions.
26
A saffron-robed figure passed through a shaft of morning light and it became obvious as he drew closer that it was Narith.
After making sure the monk was alone, Kiera and Porter rose out of the thicket and went to greet him.
Narith brought with him rice balls in a small bamboo box, for which they were both extremely grateful though it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for all the meals they’d missed, and he also came with some good news. “We need a guide into the mountains and they will provide one for us.”
While they downed the rice Narith told them about the village in the foothills—one apparently hostile to the regime, uplanders known as
kha
—would, for a small price, give them a guide to take them up into the mountains.
“They’re poor Lao Theung,” Narith said. “They have nothing. They can only work as coolies for lowland Lao when they can get any work. The government authorities come to collect taxes, but don’t like to live close to these hill people. They are not among the favored groups.”
They left the temple and walked an hour along the low hill, then up across a knoll. They crossed a narrow slope and then came on a small village barely visible at the edge of a thick jungle.
“This is one of the last large villages before you climb into the high mountains,” Narith informed them.
The village consisted of a scattering of thatched houses on stilts with bamboo shingles, looking like they could have been put together yesterday.
They saw two men a hundred yards ahead of them walking toward the village with a dead deer suspended from a pole carried on their shoulders.
Porter said, “We’ll be eating fresh, raw meat called
Laap.
Though these hill people do some swidden rice, their diet comes more from hunting and foraging. With no refrigeration you’ll get a different cuisine.”
“I don’t think I’m real big on eating raw deer meat,” Kiera said. “But I need something substantial. Rice balls only go so far.”
“There are other things. They’ll have side dishes of insects, and salads made of chopped leaves. It’s all very pre-agriculture.” They headed into the outskirts of the village. “Really it’s not as bad as it sounds. Nature’s table.”
“I’m excited about it,” Kiera said drolly, giving Porter a sidelong glance.
At least a dozen younger kids, most of them naked, watched them with huge dark eyes full of amazement and curiosity.
Kiera said, “I’m guessing white people aren’t common visitors up here.”
Narith said, “They don’t have visitors, other than maybe government troops coming through. You are what they call
falang,
in this part of the world.”
Many of the children had cleft lips, pocked skin and some had missing limbs. Kiera hated seeing kids with these conditions. She’d seen way too much of it in her travels.
Older kids were playing in a pool of water from a mountain stream and in a side pool women were washing clothes. The stream had a bamboo aqueduct to take water to a point were other women were filling buckets.
They then came on some older men playing a game on a dirt-packed court, using a metal ball that they seemed to be trying to throw into an old bike tire. “A lot like Bocce ball,” Kiera said.
The men stopped their game abruptly with the approach of the outsiders.
Porter said it was a French game called
Petanque
that now had a wide following in Laos. “The steel balls are called a
boules
and the target a
piglet.”
Porter greeted everyone with bows and handshakes and they seemed happy to have visitors. Especially, for some reason, white visitors. Maybe they’d never seen a westerner before outside of Vientiane. And most of them had probably never been to the capital.
“People often see the Laotian passivity as a cultural expression,” Porter said. He bowed to the apparent chief and introduced her. Nobody apparently spoke any English. “Their seeming passivity and charm is as much the expression of diseases that sap their energy as it is cultural. The fifty percent that don’t die at childbirth are victims of everything from malaria to gonorrhea and the Yaws and major protean deficiencies—
How are you. Yes, good to meet you—
it’s a tough life up here.”
And probably really short, Kiera thought. Porter’s description of their passivity as being not a social grace but the result of underlying diseases that sapped their energy, if true, was incredible and sad.
Porter insisted they didn’t have time for any ceremonies in the chief’s house, but Narith said it was important to show respect and eat with them.
They entered the village chief’s very simple house, removing their shoes first. Porter told her to be careful of touching the walls. Bad manners.
Three busy women had set up the center of the meager space so they could all sit on the floor mats in a big circle. In the center lay a conical shaped arrangement of banana leaves and fruit and flowers.
Orange cotton filaments hung from the arrangement.
“Very nice,” Kiera said.
The women seemed to understand her intent, if not the words, and they smiled, nodded and giggled.
“The arrangement is a
pha khwan
.” Narith said. “The ceremony
Su khwan.
“The calling of the soul.”
The village elder, wizened and lined as an ancient clay pot, called in the wandering souls during a long mantra, Narith explained. Then he and the honored guests leaned in to touch the
pha khwan
.
After that the villagers took the orange cotton threads and tied them around the wrists of their guests.
A small girl, apparently one of the chief’s daughters, and, to Kiera, way too cute for words, did this for Kiera as if doing it for visiting royalty. She touched Kiera’s skin and looked at her with her wide, beautiful eyes and smiled and nodded and hurried away, to stand by the door.
This beautiful, brilliant looking child would never have any life beyond what was given her here, Kiera thought.
“You’ll wear them for three days,” Porter said. “Then untie then. Never cut them off.”
More mantras. Out with the bad, in with the good.
The wishing of a safe journey.
Many children.
Narith explained as the ceremony went on.
That done, the villagers relaxed and began making jokes and having fun. This was followed by the meal.
The cuisine was, as threatened, raw deer meat freshly cut no doubt from the creature they’d seen being brought in from the forest.
The questionable salad was eaten with gusto by Porter and Kiera went along, if with reservations. Being starved helped. Fortunately, they also had some lowland foods—rice and some kind of soup of ingredients she chose not to know.
She’d eaten different cuisines all over the world, but this was in a class by itself. The raw meat had a strong, gamey smell and chewy texture, yet, in time, she adjusted the best she could, hoping it didn’t contain deadly diseases.
All during the meal Narith conversed with the village elder. In the middle of the discussions they were interrupted by an argument going on outside.
The chief and two men left.
Kiera glanced at Porter. “What’s going on? You think they’ve changed their minds and don’t want to give us a guide?”
“No. It’s over who gets the great honor. Narith suggested we would give them forty dollars. That’s a ton of money to these people. The only way they can actually make much money is with opium and they don’t even have that. Most of it is grown at higher altitudes and farther north. Forty dollars will buy this village some things they need in one of lowland markets.”
“How about a hundred?”
“They’ll feel rich.”
She gave Narith the money to give to the chief, and then she and Porter went over the topo map McKean had given him. It was old, but made of a plastic, waterproof material.
She compared the map, her grandfather’s coordinates and the GPS.
The distance as the crow flies was only about twenty miles. But they weren’t crows and the climb went through some very rough country. It looked daunting.
Porter showed her where they would find the Hmong, according to Narith. “The Laotian army doesn’t venture up there. Not only is getting there dangerous, but tangling with the last of the old CIA allies isn’t worth it. The Hmong used to be much farther north, but got chased down to this stretch of mountains for a last stand.”
“The people my grandfather dropped hard rice to?”
“Yes. We’ll be looking for a Hmong leader—Phommasanh—if he’s still alive.”
“He was the one McKean said was from the Secret War and knew my grandfather.”
“That’s him. They used to refer to him as Geronimo.”
In the end, the decision was made and the chief won. He was sending one of his many sons as their guide.
They said their quick goodbyes and left the village, following their wiry young guide off into the jungle to begin a long difficult climb.
Kiera was excited about the possibility of meeting someone who knew her grandfather. She felt she was walking back into his history, back to the world that had shaped her life.
It struck her as sad that her grandfather couldn’t have this moment.
But one thing she knew for certain, he would have liked Porter Vale.
PART FOUR
THE HO CHI MINH TRAIL
27
Hour upon hour they followed their guide up into the rising foothills of the vast mountain range at an exhausting pace in oppressive heat, wading across quick steams under towering trees in a jungle so imposing it ratcheted down a person’s exulted self in the scheme of things.
Kiera was astonished at the ability of the guide, Narith and Porter Vale to keep up the pace in the long climb into the higher elevations.
Kiera, though supremely conditioned, began to wonder just how much longer they could keep up the pace.
Finally, as they rose in altitude, the grip of the heat began to ease even as the climb grew more difficult, the hills steep and rugged. She got her second, or maybe it was her third, wind.
They eventually reached a level stretch. It was getting late in the day now. The guide stopped them.
In the distance at a lower fold of the mountain two men rode elephants. They watched them cross the saddle to the next rise, appearing and disappearing in the tall grasses.
Then Kiera realized the guide was pointing to something beyond the men and the elephants, farther down the valley.
Porter took the binoculars and searched along the far ridgeline. He finally stopped. “We have folks with guns heading this way.”
They were forced to change course, moving down through another thick canopy and across a stream on a flimsy footbridge, before climbing again.
Kiera heard animal cries that Porter said were warnings of their approach by one of the most exotic and rare gibbons in the world.
After a short climb up on a ridge they found four people sitting near a crumbling building that appeared to have been destroyed by bombs a long time ago.
Their guide spoke with the two men. The woman nearby watched with apprehension, sucking on what looked like a thin cigar as she breastfed a child.
The men pointed, gestured.
Their energetic guide came back with the bad information. They were being hunted by poacher gangs that were in the area.
Narith spoke with the guide, then said, “He says we need to go across dangerous ground to get to the trail up the mountain. We must be careful. The gangs know the lower elevations. We need to go up into the higher elevations fast. A risk we must take.”
Kiera studied what they had to cross. The field had an abnormal look to it as if it had never recovered from the intense bombing and defoliants. In the weeds stood the rusted remains of a truck near the shattered walls of some kind of cement structure nearly buried in the scrub growth. Boulders and rock piles lay here and there.