Fieldwork: A Novel (17 page)

"This was no accident, our coming here! Oh no! God's planning is coming together, and soon the Day will come. The wind of God had blown us down from China in the north," said Grandpa Raymond.
*
"And when the storm picks up, don't you worry, the Dyalo will come running in for Shelter. We'll be patient like a seed in the earth."

By giving those old enough to preach a goal, namely the conversion of the Dyalo of Thailand, Raymond distracted them all from the sorrows of exile. And all those old wild wandering Walker impulses, long suppressed in twenty years of jungle domesticity, came out again, to the exclusion of almost all other cares: Thomas, together with Uncle Samuel.

Uncle Jesse, and Uncle Paul, devoted themselves to learning these strange new hills. Talk at the dinner table was of preaching and baptisms, conversions and wavering villages, shamans who fought the work and headmen who—
Praise!
—were coming close to the Light. The Dyalo in these hills were strange and different, their dialect outlandish, but the Walkers knew them. Even Raymond with his bad hip couldn't keep from going into hills and limping from village to village, as he hadn't done since he himself was a young man, and when the men came down from ten days, two weeks, a month in the mountains, caked in mud, their faces were flushed red because they had felt His power. David didn't even need to ask what his father would think of his decision to see
Blacula. If you have time on your hands, son, pray for those folks in Mae Salop.
That's what his dad would say.

David had almost convinced himself to leave the theater when the lights went down. He gripped the arm rails of his seat. The roller coaster rolling slowly upward, a plane in heavy turbulence, a doctor probing the genitals, that familiar tightening of the scrotum and cloaca. He wondered: Why had he bothered to lie to his mother? As if
God
couldn't see him sitting here? As if God couldn't afford a ticket to the movies, God who had made the universe? What had he been thinking?

Why, he wondered, had nobody told him that movies were in the dark?

Then bats. That was the first thing he heard. From up above, the hysterical shrieking of a flock of bats swooping down from above, a flock of idiot bats who nested in the rafters of the old theater. Confused by the unexpected and untimely alternations of light and dark, the bats flapped and dove, as strange lights began to play across the screen, accompanied by loud music, which David recognized from school assemblies as the Royal Anthem. On the screen, the bright colors coalesced into the form of a man, and then a crowd, then dissolved and disappeared just as quickly, before David could quite decide what he was seeing. Then David realized that it was just as his mother said: the screen was all
one moving photograph
. He saw the king of Thailand on the screen. In his anxiety David had hardly noticed the others in the audience, but now, looking around, he realized that he was the only one still sitting. He stood up.

David knew that when presented for the very first time with a photograph, many Dyalo, particularly the old people, have trouble interpreting it. It would only be colors and lines to them. They would hold it right up close to their eyes and then far away, then upside down or sideways, and would call their wives over, and say, "Do you see anything here?" and David would say, "Don't you see? That's a nose and that's eyes and that's a mouth there." And still the old Dyalo just wouldn't get it, until all of a sudden, like someone examining those optical-illusion puzzles which show
either
a candlestick
or
two faces, they'd say, "Ah-hah!" and they'd figure out what was going on—although each new photograph would still require long scrutiny before the "Ah-hah, isn't
that
clever!" moment.

Now David found himself in the same confused position. There were photographs of the king on the walls of every shop in Chiang Mai, but
this
—this was another thing entirely. What his mother had never mentioned was that the photograph was constantly
changing
. The king would appear in one place and then in another, on the left side of the screen and on the right, an older man and a younger man, dressed in a suit and then in the ochre robes of a Buddhist monk, and then in a military uniform, and then in the elaborate royal gowns. David would only begin to figure out who the king was, and then the king would disappear again. Sometimes the king would move, but sometimes the camera rotated and advanced, even gained altitude and perspective, while the king stayed in the same place. There was the king humbly reciprocating the bow of an old peasant lady; then the king in a military jeep. The king was driving, his regal face a study in concentration. Now the king was on elephant-back heading up into the hills. Bats flew across the king's face. The king's jeep was driving toward the camera, and David involuntarily ducked and then a second later stood up straight again, feeling foolish. Then the anthem swelled to its dramatic crescendo and the screen went black. The bats who lived in the rafters of the Kamtoey Theater retreated to their nesting place.

David sat back down in the dark, breathless. This was more than he expected. He had only seen the minute-long tribute to the king of Thailand which precedes the showing of every film throughout the kingdom, but David was confirmed in the very secret suspicion that he shared with every other thirteen-year-old in the world: that God and his parents really did wish to deprive him of the best pleasures in life.

All this even before the show began.

My sources told me: David grew into a tall, skinny, strong young man, with his father's moss-green eyes and his mother's tomato-red skin. Because he grew so fast in adolescence, his pants and shirts were always half an inch too short for him, making him seem taller still, and because in Thailand no doorway and no chair is made for somebody almost six feet three inches tall, he developed a permanent slouch, bending slightly at the waist and curling down at the neck. His dark hair was inevitably uncombed. They told me: David was good with languages, like everyone in his family. By the time he was done with high school, his Thai was nearly perfect, like his English, almost as good as his Dyalo—the language in which he thought and dreamed. He wasn't an excellent student, but he got by. He was well liked in high school but didn't have a best friend. He went on chaste, chaperoned dates with another missionary's daughter. He would juggle whatever small objects were at hand. He was one of those kids with a bottomless pit for a stomach, and sometimes he'd eat dinner at home, then at Aunt Helena's house, then stop at the noodle stall for a bowl of noodles.

Jai-yen
. That was the Thai phrase the Walkers used to describe David. It means "cool-hearted," which means easygoing, mellow, not too excitable, the kind of guy who saves his energy for things that count. If you've been saving birthday and Christmas money now for almost four years, and you've just got a new Honda motor scooter for your seventeenth birthday one week ago, and you've parked it in front of the market, and some drunk in a pickup trying to parallel park smashes into the side of it, knocks over your brand-new bike, breaks the rearview mirror, and scratches to heck the yellow paint job—and the first thing you do when you see the guy is smile, then you're
jai-yen
. David smiled, not just because he was in Thailand, where, of course, you smile when someone smashes up your bike, but also because that was the kind of guy David really
was
. It was just a motorbike. With those long, floppy limbs, and that Adam's apple one size too big for his adolescent throat and bobbing like a tea bag, the mussed-up hair, and the uneven stubble covering his chin but not yet branching up seamlessly to the mustache, the XXL T-shirts ("Chiang Mai Baptist Church 1975 Christian Youth Outing!"), the shorts with all the pockets; with the way he had of cricking his neck from side to side, that slow, thoughtful way of talking in his low but unsteady voice; never in a hurry, never sweating, even in the height of the hot season, when even the bronze Buddhas in the temples had to wipe the perspiration from their golden brows—all in all, he was just your calm, good-natured kind of kid. The kid you didn't have to worry about, because he had a level head. The kid you didn't have to take care of, because he'd make himself a sandwich or get himself some noodles or pick up Laura's prescription at the pharmacy without even being asked. The kid you didn't have to remind to do his homework, because he was pretty much on top of the situation. The kid you didn't have to tell to come home before midnight. (That was his sister Linda-Lee.) The kid who didn't get caught coming out of one of those massage parlor places. (That was David's cousin, whose name has been withheld because it was a long time ago.) David was the kid who bought his mother a goldfish tank for Mother's Day, because she'd had one, she once remarked, as a little girl, and there was nothing so calming as watching fish swim.

And in a household with three teenage girls—Ruth-Marie and Linda-Lee and David's little sister Margaret, who was twelve going on twenty-two—David was a relief. Sometimes, Norma thought, her head could just explode with the chaos in her household, especially on those hot, steamy tropical days, when she'd think that if she'd stayed in Wheaton, it would be twenty-eight degrees right now with a soft, quiet snow falling. But here she was in Thailand, her husband off in the mountains somewhere charming who-knows-who into doing who-knows-what; Ruth-Marie and Linda-Lee were having another one of their knock-down, drag-out fights; Margaret just bought her first tube of lipstick; little Paul had a fever; Laura wanted to show her
once again
how to can mangoes—and bedraggled and sweaty, she'd knock on the door of her son's room and say, "David, can I just come in here and close the door behind me?"

Of course, David's room would be a mess; the kid didn't—he couldn't—keep anything neat: heaps of papers from school on the floor, all his old clothes piled up and perhaps a little ripe, puzzles and games in the corner which he had long outgrown but which his grandparents in America still thought were to his taste and sent him, the guitar which he was forever plucking lying on his unmade bed, sheets tangled on the floor. But for Norma, the room was dry land when the good ship SS
Walker Family Mission
seemed in danger of going under. Five kids in the jungle was
easy
compared to five adolescents in Chiang Mai. And the nice thing about David was, he got it. He really did. He'd laugh his rumbling not-quite-sure-what-my-voice-box-will-do-next laugh and say, "They're driving you nuts, huh? Come on in, Mom, you can hide out in here."

Just a really good calm kid.

But of course there was another side to things as well. That family was a pressure cooker, like the rice steamer in the kitchen, always on, always hot. Aunt Helena, who is the family's informal psychologist and the only Walker I met who in any way could see things from an outsider's perspective, said that in retrospect the big fight wasn't about those trips to the Kamtoey Theater at all. There was simply so much
pressure
on David, she said. She told me that I couldn't imagine what it was like to grow up the oldest son of a great preacher, the grandson of another, with so much real achievement on a boy's shoulders, and so many people's hopes. When David was a little boy, nobody ever asked him, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" They asked him, "Are you going to preach the Gospel like your daddy? Are you going to save souls too?" And what could David do but smile his sweet little-boy smile and say, "Yes, when I'm big enough." They told David, "God has chosen you." Somewhere along the way, the people in David's life just started telling him how beautiful it was that he was giving his life to Christ. When all the other kids at school started after-school prep sessions for the SAT, thinking about college back in America, Thomas just said, right in front of David, what his own dad had said a long time ago: "Why bother? It's just tits on a bull." Norma thought maybe David might want to go to Bible college for a couple of years, as she had; she had never regretted her education. But that was the most extreme suggestion anyone in the Walker family offered David for his future.

From the moment David staggered out of the Kamtoey Theater for the first time, he lived a divided life. There was his life as a Walker, in which it was understood that preparing the Dyalo for the Rapture was the absolute and overwhelming goal of his young existence. Then there was his other life, his real life, the life at the Kamtoey Theater, where every Tuesday at five he forgot entirely for two hours to pray. For almost six years David kept his two lives strictly separate. Sometimes when he left the Kamtoey Theater, having seen policemen and lawyers, doctors and politicians, hippies and pimps and gangsters and adventurers and detectives and reporters, sometimes on the way back home to the big pink house with the brass placard that read south china christian mission, he thought he was barreling down a dark tunnel so narrow and confining he could not even lift his arms.

Thomas's sister Sarah was on the subscriber list to a newsletter called
Christian Family Alert!
, a mishmash of advice on Christian living and snippets of biblical commentary and interpretation, mixed up with stories about cute things the kids and pets did, together with household tips and advice. When she was done reading
Christian Family Alert!
, Sarah usually passed it along to her sister-in-law Nomie, who, in those few calm quiet moments that she could steal from her household, liked to read the newsletter at the kitchen table, sipping green tea and clipping out the recipes, because the thing she had been meaning to get for the longest time was a good cookbook, in English, filled with the kind of midwestern recipes on which she had been raised, and the recipes in
Christian Family Alert!
were actually pretty darned good. When Nomie was done, she left
Christian Family Alert!
in the kitchen, where her husband read it over his morning tea.