The Blue-Eyed Shan (22 page)

“That is true.” The little man seemed bewildered and crestfallen.

Greenwood hoped a few of the others were equally confused.

“Nevertheless,” said Swarthy, “you are an American, which is a kind of Englishman, and you are wandering these hills with a fine weapon and a pony, and your destination is Motai or perhaps Fang-shih but you seem to be taking the long way around, and you speak good Shan, and it is my opinion that you fought here in the war.” He paused here with a powerful nod, as if to allow time for applause. He then stroked his mustache, left and right.

“That is well considered. I fought here in the war. I hope never to kill again, but who knows what the gods will ask. I have returned one last time to visit the land I love, whose soil has drunk some drops of my blood, and that is the whole of it. Motai, Fang-shih, these are merely names along the way, like the names of railway stations, which are of no interest; what is of interest is the landscape between.”

“He talks and talks,” said Strapping.

“So you fought against the Japanese,” Swarthy said.

“I fought for a free Burma,” Greenwood said.

“I fought beside the Japanese, to free Burma by driving the British out,” said Swarthy.

“Then we may have tried to kill each other.” Greenwood raised his voice. “How many here fought against the Japanese?”

Three voices muttered.

“And against the British?”

“He and I,” said the tiny Burman.

Fat Man had not spoken, not stirred.

“And who is to say now which was right and which wrong? Is Burma not free?”

“Far too free,” Swarthy said. “Where did you see war?”

Greenwood spat a shred of tobacco. “First at Lashio in nineteen forty-two.”

“Ha! We broke you! We drove you out! The Chinese Fifty-fifth melted away overnight!”

“We did not melt away,” the Chinese called. “We ran like deer.”

“Then in late forty-two I was dropped in to join the Kachin up by Loi Panglon, and we raided for a year.”

“I was never there,” Swarthy said, again with a glance at Fat Man. “Do you tell us that you truly jumped out of an aircraft?”

“We should kill these two and move out,” Strapping said. “Those are good Kachin ponies.”

Again Swarthy's temper: “I decide! I decide!”

“Then I was ordered south and joined the Shan.” Greenwood kept the chatter flowing. His earlier time with the Shan was none of their business, and he would not speak of Pawlu. He hoped Jum-aw would keep silence. Fortunately, the boy seemed incapable of speech.

“How far south? Namsang?”

“Never that far.” Greenwood's stomach griped and heaved. He swallowed his gorge.

Swarthy seemed disappointed. “Then we never fought, you and I.”

“Then why begin?”

“This is foolish,” Strapping said. “Let's do it. Talk, talk, talk.”

“You may be right.” Swarthy brooded. “Objections?”

“I object strongly,” Greenwood said.

This jest was uncommonly successful, and there followed much whacking of thighs and wiping of tears. Greenwood was physically cold. In battle he had felt fear, but there was the job to do; one did not so much overcome fear as forget about it. But now he sat on a hillside in the land of the Tai, as the Shan called themselves, as all Burmese called them, and Greenwood was a foreigner who thought of them always by their foreign name, the Shan, and he was a long way from the nearest graduate student, and this was a most unusual faculty meeting, and he had thirty-five years of life on this earth honorably completed, with a strong body, a questing mind and a compassionate heart, and—no!—this was not the way to go!

He would have a second or two, no more; and he would have no hope; and he had at twenty been a pacifist and hoped to be one again; but now if his time had come, he would do all in his power to lay one hand on that tommy gun and take one or more of these killers with him.

“Leave the boy alone,” he said. “Take his pony but leave him alone. He is only my hired hand and I am responsible for him. He has no money and no goods and is of no importance to you. Do not send me to the long sleep with his death to trouble my dreams. This much I ask you. Think of it as the last wish of a dying man. And now I want to stand up because it is the best way to die.” As he scrabbled up he could clutch at the weapon. The safety was on, God damn it.

“Nonsense,” said Strapping. “Both of them. If their time has come, their time has come, and who can object?”

Fat Man spoke then for the first time, in a hollow bass rumble. “Well, I may have an objection, and the gods may smite me if I do not state it! You come here, and you.” Swarthy and Strapping stepped to his side and stooped to hear. Fat Man murmured, and smiled pleasantly at Greenwood.

Greenwood made no move toward his weapon. The others were armed, he was surely covered, and this was a new development and therefore an improvement.

Swarthy spoke: “Tell us your name, American.”

“Greenwood.”

“In Shan.”

“Green Wood.”

Swarthy and Strapping turned to gape at Fat Man. They were thunderstruck. Greenwood was at least puzzled. Fat Man was laughing. “Ha! Ha! Did I not say so? Green Wood!”

Greenwood was wholly wrapped in gooseflesh. He felt his hairs stir and prickle. The cheroot was dead.

Ponderously Fat Man rose. “And on midwinter day of the third winter, halfway between Bhamo and Su-i on that terrible road with—Well, what is it that never disappears on that road?”

“Mud slides,” Greenwood said, and his heart leapt like a lover's.

“Mud slides indeed! And that day you destroyed—Well, what did you destroy?”

“Two Japanese armored cars and a truck full of slaves.”

“And what did those slaves do?”

“They vanished into the forest, as I would have in their place.” Now Greenwood too stood up, and he flung away the cheroot.

“And do you remember Pwe-nin?”

A little bad luck was due, and perhaps not fatal. “Ah no. No, I do not.”

“Well, it was a village nearby. It was where the Japanese stabled those armored cars.”

“That little command post. With the aerial running up the old oak. We wiped it out.”

Fat Man waddled across the bivouac. For some moments he and Greenwood communed. Fat Man then turned to confront the band. “Kill if you must. But you kill me too. I stand
here
.” He clapped Greenwood on the shoulder, almost breaking bone.

Swarthy grumbled, “How is a man to make a living?”

And then Strapping complained, “This is playacting. Seven years have passed! In seven years all debts are canceled.”

“All but one.” Fat Man's tone banished doubt; this would be a fight. On the machine pistol Greenwood saw kana, the little Japanese phonetic characters. The weapon seemed in order and gleamed in a sleek and healthy manner. Greenwood considered retrieving his tommy gun, but rejected the notion as indelicate. Jum-aw, possibly comatose, sat like a statue.

The five unconverted brigands were on their feet, and easing apart.

Fat Man continued angrily in formal North Shan. To Greenwood it was like hearing a passage from the Book of Common Prayer. “I have been a slave and am no more. Of your beloved Japanese was I a slave,” he spat at Swarthy, “and in chains, and all bones and no flesh was I and my death soon upon me. Your Japanese had sent my father on before with a bullet in the back, and my mother too was a slave, and every man and woman in Pwe-nin, and there was not a village on those slops left free, and the Japanese were working the men to death and fucking the women to death.” Fat Man clutched the weapon to him as if now, at last, the time had come for revenge. Flecks of spittle flew as he raged. “And we slept chained together and woke chained together and ate chained together and shat chained together, and when one died, another was brought to wear his chains. And one of those carried news of this Green Wood, a golden man with ice for eyes who led Kachin and Shan alike and fought like a living god.”

Greenwood was impressed, even awed.

“And we prayed to the Lord Buddha and all his helpers that this Green Wood would come for us, or if not he, then death. And now I ask this: Who upholds the world if not the righteous man? And who is a righteous man if not he who travels far to free a slave? And this Green Wood, when his death was upon him today, what did he ask? That the innocent be spared. And did he grovel? No. And did he beg? No. And did he wail? No. And did he haggle? No. I tell you, there was less of me seven years ago than there is of a toktay, and now I am half an elephant, but I am the same soul, and even if I have not remembered this Green Wood once a year I do not forget that my life is his.”

Other words were thronging Greenwood's memory: I have been young and now am old, yet never have I seen the righteous man forsaken, or his seed begging bread. He had not believed much in God but had held greatly by courage, loyalty and affection, and this exotic encounter had become a sunrise service. He wanted to embrace Fat Man, and it was far more than simple relief.

Fat Man ended curtly: “So say. Or do.”

O, by the gods,” Swarthy said immediately, “if that is what you want.”

Strapping restored proportion by picking his nose pensively, after which he shrugged, sprawled, laid his rifle on the dewy grass against all good sense and precept, and said, “Those are nice ponies, just the same.”

The others made mumble in disgust, apology, curiosity, resignation.

Echoing Fat Man's gesture, Greenwood set a hard, grateful hand on his shoulder. Instinct told him to seal the moment with all of them. “If these minor bickerings are resolved,” he said, “old Green Wood the living god would like to empty his bladder and break his fast.”

To his inexpressible pleasure the bandits guffawed in chorus. It was true: in any country, in any language, the outhouse was surefire.

“Go to it!” Swarthy called. “Do you people do it just like everybody?”

“On your feet,” Greenwood said to Jum-aw. All must now be normal, daily, lighthearted, he knew, with no relapse into tension or surliness.

Jum-aw's eyes were cast down.

“Come now,” Greenwood said. “It is over.”

“I cannot,” Jum-aw whispered.

“Of course you can. Surely you too must piss.”

Tears hung glistening in the boy's eyes. “I have done so despite myself. I would be ashamed to stand up.”

Fat Man had overheard, and chuckled. “Poor little fellow.”

“Listen to me,” Greenwood said. “In my first battle I did worse than that. Now stand up and be a man.” “Wet behind the ears, wet between the legs, what difference? All men are brothers. Himself, ready to retch.

“The shame will pass,” Fat Man said to Jum-aw. “And it is not true shame, only embarrassment. Green Wood,” he said, “now I can thank you, as I do in the name of all gods, and I can wish you, from the heart, long life and much silver and many women, and sons to keep alive a good name. A whole ten of us walked for three days in those chains until we found a free village with a smith. I can still see that truck burning. It was a gloriout moment. I wept.”

“It seems to me that I should do the thanking,” Greenwood said.

“A life each,” Fat Man said. “And the best is yet to come. For breakfast we have fresh gyi, three days old, exactly ripe, and white ant eggs, found only yesterday.”

Jum-aw later lost the way; Greenwood found it. They clopped slowly upward into the realm of the green-and-gold-backed woodpecker and the kite, leaving paddy birds and parrots behind. In the evening bats swooped and feinted, often with a whisper of wingbeats. The moon waxed, and Greenwood's sleep was less easy; his listened, dreams intruded, his hand twitched toward his weapon. One afternoon Jum-aw said, “That is Flying Dragon Pass, there to the south.”

“It is indeed. I knew it well, once.”

Jum-aw reined in.

“You have something to tell me.”

“Yes,” Jum-aw said. “Best play no tricks. Since yesterday noon I have guided you by Flying Dragon Pass, using it to extend my track as the evening star lengthens the day. But I am now unsure.”

“You do well to tell me,” Greenwood said. “Keep an eye out for cops and robbers.” He used an old Shan term for “brigands and executioners.” Jum-aw was obviously relieved by the leniency, the little joke, and grimaced in apology. Greenwood dug into his pack for the worn, reliable U.S. army compass that had led him home from so many Japanese encampments. He flipped it open, steadied it, squinted. Magnetic variation was negligible, about one degree west, and he had always navigated by compass rather than chart. He had seen many modern maps on which this region was marked
DATA UNRELIABLE
or
DEMARCATION APPROXIMATE
or
BORDER UNCERTAIN
. Contours would help—heights, slopes—but only if accurate; one mountain was much like another hereabouts. “I believe we should continue half east half north,” he said. “What do you think?”

“That way?”

“That way.”

“It seems reasonable. I have failed you.”

“Nonsense. I will wager a fat cheroot that we find a landmark this afternoon. The hard part is accomplished, and it was you who did it.”

Greenwood pocketed the compass and remounted. He used it again at two forks. He was becoming Green Wood again and had caught himself thinking in Shan, which pleased him. His butt was comfortable on the nappy saddle blanket and the mountain air was sharp. He felt lighter.

In midafternoon they paused by a frothy stream to hear its music, to drink and to repose themselves. Here the trail branched. A few yards upstream the bank was bare, a glistering face of gray and pink rock, and Greenwood knew where they were: at Three-Tined-Fork-by-the-Brook.

“You may return now if you want,” he said. “There will be Wild Wa to worry about.”

Jum-aw's young brows beetled. “Then you know this trail.”