The Merry Misogynist (2 page)

Madame Daeng wheeled her cart out to the pavement and joined Siri in his revelry. She put her arm around his waist.

“Poor man,” she said.

“Him or me?”

“Comrade Koomki. I don’t suppose I need to tell you what you just did probably wasn’t a good idea.”

“Good idea? He comes here, spying, at six o’clock on a Saturday morning to see if I’m wearing pyjamas…?”

“I know.”

“What’s the country coming to? Is this what we labored in the jungles for thirty years to produce?”

“I know.”

“Bloody little bureaucrat with his clipboard and lists. If he were 50 centimetres taller I might have given him a right hook.” He showed her his right hook, and she felt his muscle. “Even the old one-two.”

“My hero.”

They gazed at the retrograde fisherman until he turned to look at them and waved. They waved back.

“But it probably wasn’t a good idea,” Siri agreed, recalling all his other dust-ups with government officials.

“Probably not. Did you know you had ladies of ill repute at your house?”

“He has to be talking about Mrs Fah’s nieces.”

“She didn’t mention their old career?”

“All she said was they were back from the islands. She could have meant a resort vacation for all I knew.”

“More likely the internment camps on the reservoir. But if they were released it means they’ve served their time. And if they were really on Don Nang with hardened criminals it wouldn’t have been a very pleasant experience. The last thing they want is nosy cadres breathing down their necks.”

“It’s the last thing any of us wants. According to Fah, they both lost husbands to the war and children to disease. They’re long overdue a gust of good fortune.”

“Well, they did find a kindly old gentleman to take them in off the streets. And what about your monk?”

“Comrade Noo? He did well to keep his mouth shut. If they’d found out he was Thai they’d have whisked him off to Immigration, never to be seen again.”

“Your house is getting out of control.”

“So it would appear. Since Nurse Dtui and I moved out to our respective love nests it’s been hard to keep a check on who’s moving in or out. I suppose I should stop by there tomorrow and do a head count.”

“I’ll come with you. It’s always a laugh to spend time at your house. It makes me feel…I don’t know, saner.”

Phan often considered the possibility that he might have the ‘everything’ that other men craved: a regular job that allowed him to travel, several government letters of identification, and looks that naive country girls found interesting. And of course he had a truck. A man with a truck was somebody in Laos. With its solid double-plated frame and its growling Chinese engine, it broadcast his power. Of course he didn’t own it but nobody needed to know that. Being allowed to drive a department vehicle was almost as good. He liked the way they watched him pass, the dull nowhere girls sitting on their front porches, hoping for life to come by and call for them to climb aboard. If he chanced to stop they’d almost turn pirouettes and crash face-first onto the dirt
.

That power had taken control of him. It wasn’t simply that he could bed them; that was easy. Mothers sometimes brought their daughters to him and asked whether he’d like to take them for a trial run. No, it was the knowledge that he could woo a respectable girl – untouched, unsullied, saved for something special – that he could talk his way into the family home, make a seemingly genuine display of his affection, and have them all believe he was a legitimate catch
.

His record had been five days: the platonic seduction, dinner with the parents, a display of credentials and bank statement, trip to the registry office in the nearest town – all before the week was over. It still amazed him how quickly he had taken possession of her. The document said she was his. All he needed was to take her maidenhead, and then her life. Was there anywhere else in the world where you could claim ownership of another human being in such a short period of time? He didn’t know of it. Perhaps there was a place in Africa or South America where parents were so desperate to see their loved ones secure that they’d overlook little discrepancies, take shortcuts with paperwork
.

These were desperate times. “She had her opportunity,” they would have said. “This nice fellow came from the city and he fell in love with her. But he was only in town for a month before his project ended. We couldn’t let a chance like that go by, could we now?” All they wanted for their daughter was a good, financially secure suitor with polite manners, reasonable looks, connections with the Party…oh, and a truck would be nice
.

All he required was beauty, virginity…and a long, squeezable neck
.

He walked from the headman’s house, where he’d secured a mattress for the night. The sun was setting behind the grey-mauve mountains and the insects were at evensong, filling the valley with a monotone soprano. A crest of pines surrounded the village of bamboo-and-elephant-grass shanties with odd corrugated roofs. Most huts had twig fences around them and flowery borders of bougainvilleas and steamy blue convolvuli. It gave the place that nice feeling that always made Phan uncomfortable
.

On his work roster this little place was classified as a town. But he’d travelled and he knew what a town should look like. Being located on a provincial main road didn’t change a thing as far as he was concerned. A village was a village. Even some of the provincial capitals were no more than villages: broad, spread-out ramshackle villages with concrete blocks here and there. Villages filled with ignorant, unpleasant people who would never appreciate the finer things in life
.

He nodded at householders, deliberately stopping to chat and state his business. In a hamlet this size, that news would find its way around before the evening meal. After twenty minutes of casual, hands-in-pockets strolling, he’d already come to the edge of the village. There was nothing but a dirt trail leading off into the woods up ahead. He sat beside a urine green pond where a lanky crane stood on one leg, staring back at him. A toad stirred in the grass at his feet. He eased his foot under its belly and volleyed it out into the water
.

As all patient hunters learn, sitting quietly for long enough will invariably draw prey. Phan hadn’t been at his post for more than ten minutes before he heard the voices of young children approaching along the dirt track. Through the reeds he could make out a dozen or so shirts of various degrees of whiteness. The children disappeared into the long shadow of the mountain, then re-emerged, laughing and frolicking into the last of the sunlight. And with them was the perfect woman. She held books: probably a young teacher returning from school with her flock. She was slim but had full breasts. Her buttocks were shapely enough to cause her
phasin
skirt to bunch a little below the belt. There was nothing worse than a woman with no arse. But her face, oh, her face was perfection, no sun damage or moles or acne scars or hairy sideburns. She would do very nicely. So soon after his last honeymoon but still he had no intention of letting up. He was insatiable
.

One of the children saw him sitting by himself by the pond and nudged her playmate. Soon, all eyes were on him, the young teacher’s included. Strangers were a rarity, and well-groomed, presentable strangers might have dropped to earth from another planet. The children stopped and stared at him and were admonished by their teacher
.

“
Some manners, children. This isn’t the zoo,” she said
.

She nodded an apology to the stranger and shepherded everyone along. She would look back, he knew. How she did so would tell him whether she was married or single. A married woman would be flush with the confidence that comes from having snared a husband and consumed him. Once penetrated, a woman became a slut, soiled, easy pickings. A wife’s whoring nature would inspire her to turn back with a brazen, inviting smile
.

He waited. At the very last minute she turned. It was a brief, almost accidental look. Her face flushed crimson with embarrassment when she saw him looking back at her. She quickened her pace and was eaten up by the vegetation that bordered the track. But it was enough. She was his
.

Insatiable and irresistible
.

When Dr Siri arrived at Mahosot Hospital at 8:15 there was a dog asleep in his parking spot. It had to be his spot, today of all days. There was just the one place shaded by a bashful-desire tree for the hottest part of the day and he’d put his territorial marker on it in the shape of an unarmed claymore mine with his initials on it. There were twenty other empty spaces to sleep but the dog appeared to have the same criteria as the doctor. Siri beeped his horn. Nothing. He edged forward. No movement. He was considering whether to just drive on over the animal when the dog looked up. His eyes were hepatitis yellow with no visible irises.

“Saloop?”

When he was still alive, Saloop had been Siri’s dog. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that Siri had been Saloop’s man. The dog had adopted Siri, saved his life once, and become a fixture in the yard of the bungalow at That Luang. Then one day he’d been murdered by the neighbour in cold blood – brained with a garden shovel.

The doctor was surprised but not shocked to see him. He’d seen worse. He had an uncomfortable relationship with the spirit world. Through no fault of his own, Siri hosted the soul of Yeh Ming, a thousand-year-old Hmong shaman. It appeared the spirit had come to rest in him following negotiations with Siri’s father. He’d been too little to remember anything about it. His father had not bothered to-stick around in Siri’s childhood memories. For as long as he could remember, Siri had been visited in his dreams by the ghosts of departed patients. Over the past two years, those spirits had begun to slip out of his unconscious and haunt him in his waking hours. He didn’t allow them to frighten him.

Siri was certain that if he were more intelligent or a better detective, he’d be able to interpret what he was being shown. He often arrived at the eureka moment long after the fact, when the mysteries had been solved by more conventional, mundane methods. His forehead was permanently bruised and disfigured from his constant slapping at it when he realized what the spirits had been trying to tell him. Perhaps it was due to his inadequacies as a host that he had only confided his infirmity to three people: his lab nurse, Dtui; his best friend, Civilai; and his wife, Madame Daeng. They’d taken it quite well, considering. Inspector Phosy of the Central Intelligence Unit had arrived by means of a policeman’s instinct at the conclusion that Siri wasn’t all there. But he was not averse to a good ghost story either.

Siri had learned to observe rationally. There were times when he braved nightmares like a confident swimmer, knowing he’d end up on the bank unscathed. There were malignant ghosts like the
Phibob
of the forest who hounded Yeh Ming’s spirit. They constantly hummed around him like vindictive wasps, waiting for a moment of weakness when they could sting. Had it not been for a sacred amulet at his neck, Siri would certainly not have made it to his second marriage. But the vast majority of spirits were harmless.

Siri sat on the saddle of his Triumph and shook his head as Saloop rose creakily on his dead legs. The scientist in Siri wondered what had happened to his inner cynic. He’d mocked his way through a temple education, raised a philosophical finger to the Virgin Mary while studying in Paris, and made fun of the shamans and fortune-tellers upon his return to Asia. Perhaps this was their revenge: bringing him eyeball to eyeball with a dead dog inquiring after his health.

“How are you, boy?” he asked.

Saloop had, not surprisingly, lost his big-smiling, waggy-tailed savoir faire since he’d passed away. He scratched halfheartedly and drooled green bile. He stepped across the loose bricks and into the vegetable garden, where he started to dig. Siri decided that a filmmaker might have had trouble representing the scene. Saloop was undoubtedly digging deep into the earth but the actual dirt wasn’t moving. There was no hole, yet the dog was in it. He emerged with a bone in his mouth and took one step towards Siri.

A bicycle bell sounded behind the doctor and he turned to see Dr Mut, the urologist, attempting to reach his parking spot. When Siri turned back, the dog, the bone, and the non-hole were gone.

By the time Siri entered the morgue, Nurse Dtui and Mr Geung, the lab assistant, were already at work. Siri heard their voices in the cutting room so he threw his shoulder bag on his desk and went to join them. They were standing on either side of a body. He knew it must have arrived that morning while he was convening with the dog. He’d been there till eight the previous evening, and as it was an offence to die outside office hours in Vientiane, this body wouldn’t have been allowed in the morgue until eight that morning. The tobacco leaves in which it had been wrapped were on the floor beneath the table.

“Hello, my staff,” Siri said with a smile.

“G…goo…good morning, Comrade Doctor,” said Geung. No matter how many times he’d attempted it, Geung had never once managed to get out the greeting in one breath. Down’s syndrome was a bugger.

“Mr Geung, what have you done with your hair?” Siri asked. “You look like a – ”

“Like Elvis?” Dtui interrupted. Already a well-rounded girl, she was now twice her normal size, swollen with her first child. She was a country lass, born in the troubled north-east, and she’d never crossed an ocean. But she had spent a good many years with her nose buried in Thai pop magazines so she knew the world – or at least the important parts of it. Siri was a movie buff so he knew of Elvis from
Jailhouse Rock
and
G.I. Blues
.

“I was about to say a mountain goat,” he confessed. “What have you done to him?”

“It’s a fra…a fra…What is it, Dtui?” Geung asked.

“A fringe, babe,” she reminded him. “It’s our new look. I was getting sick of staring at his greasy centre parting, so we’ve had a bit of a makeover. I came in early and gave him a shampoo and a snip. I think he looks very handsome.”