By Jason Sanford Aug 22, 2007, 16:20 GMT
Nam jai—Thai—water heart, the flowing heart. Difficult-to-translate concept in Thai culture embracing charity, compassion, altruism, trust, hospitality, consideration, sincere concern, and generosity.
I paddle—silent—the dugout canoe smack-soft gliding through the flood water ripples until the main dike looms ahead in the night. A dark line through darkness. Flooded Thai village on our side. Dry shoe factory on the other.
Loong Chian nods as we land on the dike. He steps out, helps another villager out, then holds the canoe steady while I climb out.
Silent. We dig. Shovel into wet clay. Silent. We watch. Nervously eye the drunk guards fifty meters down the dike.
I think of my father. He’d blow the dike. A handful of illegal dynamite would be nothing to him after all his years in prison. The flood would pour across the rice fields, across the plains, across the shoe factory. Leave the village a little bit drier.
But we dig for an hour and barely breach the dike. Only a trickle of water running. And the guards hear us before we can dig any more.
Loong Chian, laughing, yells at them in Thai. “Don’t shoot. We have the farang with us.”
The foreigner is with us.
The guards laugh back. Shoot the shotgun in the air instead of at us. We climb back in the canoe and paddle back to the village. When the guards are done drinking, they’ll waddle down to our defiant sabotage and fill in the leak and that will be that.
The ripples of the flood waters against the dike. The ripples against the canoe as we paddle home. The ripples every day until the flood finally departs our lives.
* * *
Three months of Thailand’s rainy season splashing down. The square box of rain pouring off the roof tiles into the flood waters below. The deep hollow clucks of bamboo smashing against each other in the wind. The flood waters slowly climbing up the stilts of the school, of my house.
Before the school flooded, I sandbagged with my fellow teachers in the futile attempt to keep the waters out. Now, I do nothing. I simply wake up in the morning and eat breakfast, then wade to the post office to see if there are any letters or telegrams from the Peace Corps office in Bangkok. Then I wade home and sit on my stairs and read books. Or go for late afternoon swims. Or join the other water-logged teachers for dinner and gossip.
My father would have called this a vacation in paradise, but since his release from prison everything about life is a vacation to him. My father lives on the Gulf Coast half a world away. He claims the only thing which kept him going in that cold prison cell was the thought of one day living at the beach. Of waking up and feeling sun and heat. Of knowing he didn’t have shit to do because he now lived in paradise.
Of course, I’m also in paradise. I’m also isolated. Have no idea of the lives around me. Merely see the waters rippling. Imagine everyone’s content like me.
Naivety. In paradise.
And then my neighbor’s septic tank explodes during breakfast.
At first I try ignoring the smell of sewage. I focus on the morning sun. On the cool, watery breeze. On my bowl of not-very-Thai-like Frosted Flakes mixed with unspoilable UHT milk. But as the sewage bubbles in the flood waters below my house, the smell of ferment and bacteria knocks away my taste for eating.
Finally, I walk to the window. My neighbor, Khun Bua, squats on the stairs of his house, staring at a dark cloud in the water below. A few hours from now I’ll know that Khun Bua guards the dyke at night with a shotgun, keeping out saboteurs. But I don’t know this right now.
“Problem?” I ask in Thai.
Khun Bua looks up and smiles politely. No, he says. No problem. Which is also what he’ll say when he holds the shotgun to my face.
“Need any help?”
Khun Bua says no, he doesn’t need my help.
I shrug. I start to mention that my own toilet has been backed up for two days, and that maybe what’s causing my problem also ruptured Khun Bua’s septic tank. But Khun Bua doesn’t like me, so I keep quiet and watch as the stocky Thai man pulls a long metal pipe from a storage box slung under his house. He taps the long pipe against the cement septic tank hidden under the water and mud. After a few taps, he throws the pole into the water in a display of not-very-Thai-like anger. Sewage still bubbles happily away.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
Khun Bua smiles at me. Not a smile like most Thai people give—not a welcoming smile, not a laid back smile, not a whatever mai pen rai smile. Khun Bua smiles like he wishes he could tap me upside the head with the metal pole. As I again wonder what I’ve done to make Khun Bua hate me, he walks down his stairs and paddles away in his wooden canoe.
I stare into the rising sun. Feel the humidity mix with the morning breeze. Feel the smell of water and vegetation and decay and life and shit. Feel paradise.
After breakfast I’m reading a book on my front steps when Loong Chian wades up to my house.
“Hello, Jerry,” Loong Chian says as the sewage flows wavy ink lines around his body. “Lovely water.”
“Khun Bua’s septic tank burst.”
Loong Chian nods as if this is too obvious for words. “He doesn’t like you, you know,” he says cheerfully. Loong Chian speaks perfect English. Is painfully honesty while using it. As if truth comes easy for him when his fellow Thais don’t understand it.
Before I can ask why Khun Bua hates me, Loong Chian changes the subject and says he is going to market. “Want to come?”
I stare at the sewage dancing around Loong Chian’s knees.
“Think of it as another Peace Corps experience,” Loong Chian says.
I shrug and wade through the sewage, making a mental note to add this to my descriptions of paradise in next letter home.
Loong Chian and I wade by the once-dry ground where we met, two months ago when I first arrived at Sa Klee School. Dying, waterlogged trees show the shady spot where Loong Chian, in his traditional blue Thai farmers shirt, sat meditating on that morning.
Pee Tam, the school’s younger teacher, introduced us. “Jerry,” she said. “This Ajaan Chian, our most venerable teacher.”
Ajaan Chian. Teacher Chian. A sign of respect. I couldn’t yet call him Uncle Chian because we didn’t yet know each other.
Ajaan Chian and I both bowed in proper Thai fashion.
“Ajaan Chian has taught here for a long time,” Pee Tam said. “He even speaks a little English.”
“Really?” I asked.
Ajaan Chian nodded, then asked a question in a machine-quick Thai that I couldn’t understand. Being polite, I said yes.
Pee Tam sucked her breath in and fumbled over the translation. “He asked if you have known any Thai women.”
“Yes, you,” I said before understanding what Ajaan Chian was truly saying.
Pee Tam flushed red as Ajaan Chian laughed. He muttered “Good, good” between laughs, then shook hands with me before returning to his meditations.
At a party that weekend in honor of my arrival, Ajaan Chian explained—brutally, honestly—what he thought of me. We stood beneath coconut trees strung with rainbow-flashing mini-lights. We could barely hear due to the loud Thai pop music blaring from the party’s massive speaker stacks.
“Are you really supposed to know anything?” Ajaan Chian shouted in English, a carefully practiced accent from the American South evident even through his drunken words. “You Peace Corps volunteers charge my country’s cultural barbwire and bullets so American businessmen can more easily buy us. You are capitalism’s Marine Corps.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I changed the subject and asked where he’d learned such good English—especially with a Southern accent. Ajaan Chian said he studied engineering at the University of Alabama. “Back in the 60s,” he said. “Civil rights beatings, Wallace, and all. I simply love America.”
“Funny coincidence,” I said. “I was born and raised in Alabama.”
Ajaan Chian held his beer bottle up to a passing firefly and laughed, as if this coincidence was worth more than anything else I might be. Ajaan Chian then smiled, causing his thin cheek lines and long stringy hair to pair off in a quick, jittery dance.
“Then you must call me Loong Chian. Uncle Chian.”
After the party, Loong Chian and I walked to an all-night bar near the massive shoe factory outside the village, which employed over ten thousand workers from across the province. We sat and drank Mekong whiskey. I held the whiskey bottle and tried to read the label’s fine print, but my Thai was still too poor for comprehension. Two months later, I will glance with amazement at the same label on the whiskey bottle Khun Bua hands me while we sit on the dike. In this yet to arrive moment, as the shotgun in Khun Bua’s lap points menacingly at me, the Thai words on the bottle will suddenly click into meaning.
But in the bar with Loong Chian, I couldn’t understand a single word. I placed the whiskey bottle back on the counter.
“Nikes, Air Jordans, Thai tennis shoes and sandals,” Loong Chian muttered in drunken English. I realized he was talking about the shoe factory.
“Maybe people are happy about the jobs.”
Loong Chian snorted. “What a wonderfully naïve American insight. So tell me: What about your family? What do they do?”
I paused. “My mother’s dead. My father wasn’t around much.”
For a moment, Loong Chian stared at me, as if waiting for the critical element of truth. But then he took another sip of whiskey and shook his head. “Well, family can be mere details. None of that matters right now.”
Loong Chian kept drinking until he passed out at the bar. After several attempts to wake him, the bartender told me to leave him until morning.
As I walked back to the village, I noticed the bulldozers and backhoes along the built-up highway, where they dumped dirt and clay along one lane of asphalt. I hadn’t realized until now the raised highway also functioned as a dike. I briefly wondered what else I’d missed because I’d failed to understand a minor detail.
What good are details?
Detail: My father murdered my mom when I was eight.
Detail: My uncle had an affair with my mom.
Detail: My mom didn’t live long enough to tell me her side of the story.
But I didn’t know any of that at the time.
I was naïve. Happy.
Forget the details.
A few months before I left for Thailand, my father was released after fifteen years in prison. Even though I’d visited him often enough—spent a few furlough weekends together, visited every month or two at the prison—it was different sitting beside him as we drove through a Dairy Queen drive-through in Gulf Shores. Upon release my father had moved to the only place in Alabama where he could live at a beach and keep his parole legal by staying within the state.
After getting our food, we sat in my pickup eating foot-long chili dogs. Suddenly, my father frowned and held his hotdog out like a weighted scale—hand in the middle, the wiener ends wobbling up and down.
“It ain’t right,” he said. “This ain’t the foot-long they used to serve.”
“Probably got rid of the rat meat in it.”
My father laughed and coughed a fragment of wiener into his fries. He then gripped the hotdog bun in two hands and ripped it apart at the middle.
“Two hot dogs,” he said. “Guess they no longer make them with one long dog.”
My father sat there eating in silence. Finally, he said, “The army’d pay you to go to Thailand. You wouldn’t be going for free.”
My father didn’t approve of the Peace Corps—but not for what the volunteers did. He said that was good and all. He just disagreed on the not-getting-paid part.
“All those years in prison,” he said. “They worked me for ten cents an hour. I just know some bastard got rich off those ten-cents of mine.”
“And the army’s better?” I asked.
My father nodded. “I just hate to see you getting taken advantage of.”
I almost mentioned that him killing my mom had done more to get me taken advantaged of than joining the Peace Corps could ever do. But instead I ate my own foot-long-but-not-really-foot-long chili dog. I told my father he was right. Something was missing from the taste these days.
Loong Chian and I wade towards the market. In the middle of the village the flooded road rises above the water for a twenty meters or so, then dips back down before the wooden arch bridge that crosses the river. “You have to love a bridge that floods at both ends,” Loong Chian says, laughing. On the other side we wade through hip-deep water until the road rises back up near the highway.
Only one lane of the highway to Bangkok is open. Along the other lane runs the temporary earthen dike I’d seen being built two months ago. The dike stands two meters tall and twice that across—an endless-long black line of alluvial soil dredged up and packed down by a backhoe. In the dike’s dried sheen, the grooves of the backhoe’s teeth glitter like fossilized animal tracks.
I now know better than to ask why there’s a dike on the highway. Over the past month, Loong Chian has ranted numerous times about this dike, which keeps the shoe factory dry at the expense of Sa Klee village. Loong Chian considers the wall of dirt an affront to nature and history. For centuries, the river would flood across the plains. Now the dike dams up the waters, flooding the village too much and the factory none at all.
Most of the villagers, though, have taken the situation in stride. When the village market flooded, the market moved to the highway. Giant galvanized tubs full of squirming catfish sit beside oncoming traffic, while bundles of lotus blossoms beam in the exhaust of parked buses. From the flatbed of converted pickups, butchers cut chicken meat, farmers sell vegetables, and shopkeepers weigh ballooning bags of jasmine rice. Children run along the water’s edge, jumping in and out of the water and throwing mud at each other.
I buy six eggs—gingerly placed in a bag with straw for padding—along with a kilo of rice, two chicken breasts, and some pepsi and ice in a plastic bag that hangs from my fingers by a rubber band. As I sip the straw, Loong Chian and I browse the market.
“Soft drinks rot the teeth,” Loong Chian mutters. “Such a waste—whiskey should do that, not some kid’s drink.”
“You’d know about that, I guess.” We both laugh.
Not seeing anything else we needed, we wander back toward the flooded road to Sa Klee. One of our eighth-grade students, Sorasak, sits at the water’s edge with a hand-me-down flat canoe. The boat’s wooden planks are so old that water flows down the sides and collects in a pool at the bottom. Sorasak waves and asks if Loong Chian and I want a ride.
A few minutes from now, I’ll learn that Sorasak is being paid to guard the dyke. Not that this would change my view of him if I already knew it.
“Thank you,” I say. As I settle on the loose board that passes for a middle seat, Sorasak hands me an empty coke bottle.
“Please scoop out any water that gets in, Ajaan Jerry,” he says in Thai.
I dip the Coke bottle in the puddle beneath my feet, but the bottle’s long neck only sucks down a handful of water. Loong Chian smirks as he sits down on the raised planks of the bow.
The boat rides low in the water. Loong Chian breaks off the submerged leaf of a water lily and fans it across his lips. The day is hot and humid, but a passing breeze sneaks through the houses and treetops and blows a little coolness. Sorasak keeps close to the highway and soon we pass Khun Bua and several other men sitting on mats spread out along the highway dike. Around them lay empty and full bottles of Mekong Whiskey and various pipes and hoes, along with an old shotgun. “Come drink with us,” Khun Bua says.
Loong Chian smiles politely. “Perhaps later,” he says.
“What are they doing?” I ask.
“They’re protecting the dike,” Loong Chian says. “Last week, several people tried to break open a hole in the dike. The factory is paying these men to keep anyone else from doing the same.”
Sorasak smiles proudly. “I’m going to help them tonight,” he says in Thai. “You can earn lots of money.”
Loong Chian starts to open his mouth, but then closes it and keeps quiet.
As the boat passes through the village of Sa Klee, we duck under tree branches and power lines that loop down from cement-post poles and almost touch the water. All of the wooden homes and cinderblock shophouses in Sa Klee sit on telephone-pole-thick stilts or have a simple cement first floor that could be abandoned to the water. But in places, the water’s too high for even that. The family in one house we pass sit on a table, eating. Brown water ripple about the table’s legs as they yell greetings.
Sorasak drops Loong Chian off at his house—he hops out without even disturbing the boat—then Sorasak rows across the flooded road to my stairs. I stand, put one foot on the edge of the boat as Sorasak yells “No.” Before I can react, my boat foot sinks, my stair foot misses, and Sorasak’s boat raises one side up in salute. The boat sinks like a leaf from a dead tree. Sorasak and I dog paddle in place and stare down at the boat.
From the stairs of his house, Loong Chian smacks his fist in mock pain. I lift my soggy groceries out of the water—the eggs smashed, the rice soggy, and the chicken breasts gone. Sorasak apologizes for the lost food as if the accident was his fault.
Even after I wash off and change into clean clothes, I still hear Loong Chian laughing. The old teacher wades through the floods to tell each and every villager how Americans can’t climb out of boats.
When the flood waters first started rising in Sa Klee, I joined my fellow teachers in sandbagging the school’s own dike in a vain attempt to keep the waters out. It was hard work, with the temperature hot and the air so wet that sweat nestled the skin and refused to evaporate.
Some of the villagers also joined in sandbagging, most notably Khun Bua. As he and Loong Chian tied the bags off and dropped them onto the rising wall, they argued over everything—the school, life in the old days, rice farming as a way of life. But mostly they argued about the factories across the highway from the village.
“No money before the factories,” Khun Bua would say.
“No illegal drugs either,” Loong Chian would counter.
Most of the time I couldn’t understand their arguments, except that Khun Bua always defended the factories. However, they always stayed polite—swapping shots of whiskey or water, laughter, and food from their lunches.
On the second day of sandbagging, Khun Bua carried a new sandbag to the wall. However, instead of putting it on the other sandbags, he suddenly pitched it into the floodwaters. Khun Bua talked with Loong Chian for a moment then walked away.
“Why’s he stopping?” I asked.
“He’s going to look at the main dike on the highway.”
While Khun Bua walked to the main dike, the rest of us took a break in the school’s roofed sitting area. The school principal ordered pepsi and ice for everyone and we sat and drank in the shade and breezes until Khun Bua returned an hour later. He held a three-meter stick onto which he’d tied a piece of rope.
“He went to the main dike on the highway and measured how tall it is compared to the floodwaters,” Loong Chian explained. “He then asked the government engineer there how high up the main dike the waters were expected to rise.”
Everyone walked to the small sandbag wall on the school’s dike. Khun Bua held the stick so its lower end barely touched the floodwaters. The stick towered over their sandbag wall. “That’s how tall the main dike is,” Loong Chian said. Khun Bua then pointed to the rope he’d tied around the stick and said something about the floodwaters coming up to there. The rope stood a half meter taller than our sandbags.
“We don’t have enough sandbags,” Loong Chian said as everyone walked off. For the rest of the day, I helped move desks and books and papers to the second floor of the school. Two days later the floods poured over the school’s dike.
At dusk, Khun Bua’s septic tank stinks of sewage. I sweep the floorboards of my house while Loong Chian prepares dinner to the weak batteries of his flashlight. The power had been on all afternoon, but died just in time for sunset. The local joke is that anytime a dog pisses in Sa Klee, the power goes out.
I’m glad Loong Chian brought some food over because I hadn’t felt like wading back to the highway to buy more. After Loong Chian finishes cooking the stir-fried chicken and vegetables on my propane stove, we spread woven mats on the floor and sit and eat.
“I must thank you for the great laugh,” Loong Chian says between bites. “Do you understand how infrequently we mere humans get to witness something as truly wondrous as a fat American falling out of a boat.”
I smile. I’m six-two and have no fat on me, but in Loong Chian’s opinion, all Americans are too fat. Below the floorboards, a fish jumps as a canoe rows by—the space below my house is a favorite short-cut for boats. Outside the window the willow leaves shiver to the cool breeze and beyond that, the night watchman’s lantern reflects in the flood waters near the school. Off further is the highway and the main dike. Several men walk up and down the dike gesturing at each other to drunken sways of their flashlights.
“The shoe factory is buying them all the whiskey they want,” Loong Chain says with contempt. “Keeps them motivated.”
“People wouldn’t stand for this in America. We’d protest, or maybe blow the dike up.”
“You mean like the civil rights protests in the 1960s.”
“Right.”
Loong Chian takes a sip of water from an engraved tin bowl. “When I was studying at the University of Alabama,” he says, “I practiced my English by listening to the white students talk about the blacks coming to their school. While there, I never met a single white student who had the guts to stand up in front of the other whites and admit they supported doing away with segregation. Maybe everyone today says they were for it, but back then, who stood up and said a thing?”
“That’s not the same thing,” I say. “Besides, Alabama has changed.”
“Of course it has. But that doesn’t change the larger message.”
I don’t know how to respond as Loong Chian scoops more rice out of the pot and adds it to his plate. He eats it bare, without the stir fry.
“You need to know,” he states, “that I like you. Some of the attitudes you learned in America irritate, but I really like you.”
“And Khun Bua? What’s his problem with me?”
Loong Chian nods. “You try growing up in a small place like Sa Klee,” he says. “I’m outspoken, he’s outspoken, which is not something Thai culture appreciates. We’re all we’ve got at times, even when we argue.”
I almost mention that Loong Chian is avoiding the question, but instead let it go as he excuses himself and walks to the bathroom. I wash the dishes with water from the giant ceramic jar on my porch. Rainwater running off the roof fills the jar during each storm.
From the bathroom, I hear Loong Chian cursing in English as he tries to pour water down the toilet hole. “Your toilet is stopped up,” he yells.
“It’s been that way for days. I’ve been wading to the school’s bathroom when I need to go.”
The bathroom window creaks open and Loong Chian leans outside. “Your exhaust pipe isn’t hooked up to the sewer pipe,” he says. “The trapped air in the septic tank can’t escape. We’ll fix it tomorrow.”
Sometime after midnight I lay under my mosquito net, thinking about my father and home and listening to the lap of water against my home’s support pillars. I wonder about the things I’d once thought I could do with my life. I feel like I’m just floating here. Watching. Never doing.
At some point I sleep, wake, then sleep again. At three a.m. I ease an eye open to nothing but the calm knowing that something is about to happen. Suddenly a gunshot thumps out nearby, then another. I roll onto my side as feet slap-run down the highway dike, followed by a loud splash. Out the window moonlight bounces on the ceramic roof tiles of Khun Bua’s house. I listen to the low sounds from the dike: murmured talkings, the breaking of a bottle. Then a man sounding so like Khun Bua laughs and so that’s it, he is drunk and happy, and whoever had been there is gone.
In the morning I brush my teeth while leaning out the kitchen window, then spit a white blotch into the muddy waters below. The grandmother one house behind me is washing clothes on her porch. She grins her red betelnut gums and I waved back. For breakfast, I eat eggs and rice. Then Loong Chian’s boat floats up.
“Ajaan, Ajaan,” he shouts sarcastically. Teacher. Teacher.
We squat on the lowest dry step of my staircase and gaze under the house at the blue PVC pipe going from my bathroom to the septic tank below. A little plastic pipe hangs loose beside the larger pipe.
“When they put in the new pipe, they didn’t attach the exhaust,” Loong Chian says, reaching into the boat and pulling out an electric drill. “You need to drill a new hole, attach the exhaust pipe, and seal it with some PVC cement.”
I hold the drill and look at Loong Chian’s boat. “Your boat steady enough to do that in?”
“’Course not,” Loong Chian says, pulling an extension cord out of the boat. “Just wade out in the water. It’s not that deep and you’re a tall guy.”
I finger the frayed cord of the drill. The power in Thailand is 220 volts. It’ll fry you quicker than the juice in America. Electrocution in a bathtub killed that trappist monk, Thomas Merton, on a visit to Bangkok, or so my Peace Corps trainer told me in glee when I’d asked if she’d ever read Merton’s books.
“Don’t worry,” Loong Chian says. “I’ll stand by the outlet and pull the plug…if anything goes wrong.”
Loong Chian looks disappointed when I don’t trust his assessment of water and electricity. “Do it yourself,” I offer. Loong Chian declines, stating that he is too short. “I couldn’t keep the drill above the water,” he says.
We sit on the steps for a while longer and stare at the pipe. Finally, Loong Chian mutters something in Thai then rows back to his house.
That night I eat dinner alone to the hum of my bedroom’s florescent lights. At nine I turn the lights off, lay under the mosquito net and listen to a short-wave station out of Singapore. They play a rotation of cheesy American pop songs mixed with local news and traffic reports in English. I imagine commuters stuck in their cars so far away from Sa Klee’s floods and water snakes.
The radio is playing the nightly hit parade countdown when Loong Chian wakes me by banging on the floorboards under my mattress.
“Wake up, Jerry,” Loong Chian says. “You’ve got some drinking to do.”
I say I’m not in the mood to drink.
“This is important.”
I pull on my shirt and pants and sit on the stairs with Loong Chian.
“We need you to do some drinking,” Loong Chian says. He gestures to four men sitting in two additional canoes. All of them wear dark colors—deep blue Thai farmer shirts on the three older men, the younger man in a black Ozzy Ozborne T-shirt.
“What are you doing?”
Loong Chian grins. “We’re going to break the dike.”
“Didn’t they shoot someone last night?” I ask the men in Thai.
One of the older men in the canoes says no, followed by something I don’t understand. “They merely scared him,” Loong Chian translates. “Just having some fun.”
The younger man in the T-shirt says that Thai men love to drink whiskey with foreigners. “He’s right. We’ll drop you off on the dike,” Loong Chian says, “and I guarantee you they’ll start drinking and talking with you.”
“Are you trying to kill me?” I ask, thinking of the electric drill earlier. Loong Chian laughs and translates for the other men, who also laugh.
“You’re the one who said Americans take action,” he says. “Besides, the men guarding the dike are from the village. They won’t hurt you.”
Shaking my head, but also wanting to help out, I pull on my sandals and sit down in Loong Chian’s canoe. We push off from the stairs and glide under the house. Slits of lights straight line down between the floorboards.
“Why do the villagers guard the dike if it floods them out?” I ask.
“Ever notice that most of the factory workers are women?” Loong Chian whispers as he paddles. “The factory won’t hire many local men because the men might organize and strike for more money. Still, once a year, during the floods, some of the men in our village get a job guarding the dike.”
Loong Chian rows the boat around a bloated, half eaten cobra and around a flock of ducks sleeping in tall grass. Warm light flickers in the water from passing house windows. As we row under one house, we hear a man and a woman discussing intimate things in their bedroom.
“I’ll try not to give away what you’re doing,” I whisper as Loong Chian neared the dike.
“You don’t know enough Thai to give us away.”
They drop me off a hundred meters from where Khun Bua and the other men guard the dike. I stumble down the hard packed dike until Sorasak, seeing me, stands up and yells Ajaan Ajaan. Other men laugh and smile, telling me to come drink with them. Only Khun Bua doesn’t smile.
“Would you like a drink, Ajaan,” Sorasak asks in Thai. No one here speaks English. Sorasak pores a shot of whiskey into two glasses, mixes it with carbonated water from another bottle, then hands me one glass while sipping the other. He then realizes what he’s done. Students are forbidden to drink alcohol, and he just drank whiskey with his teacher.
“Ajaan Jerry, I’m not really drinking.” Sorasak pauses, as if realizing his lie stinks. “Please don’t tell Ajaan Chian,” he whispers.
The men roar with laughter. I promise Sorasak I won’t say a word, then sit on the woven reed mat spread across the dyke. Khun Bua stands up, walks over and sits beside me, an old shotgun straddling his crossed legs.
I suddenly wonder what I’ve gotten myself into.
Fortunately for me, the other men are drunk and want to talk. While my Thai isn’t that good, I can handle the simple questions they throw at me: Are you married yet? Do you have children? Do you like spicy Thai food?
No girlfriend, I say. No children. And if Thai food isn’t spicy, it isn’t any good.
The guards laugh at my rehearsed answers and urge me to drink more whiskey. Khun Bua didn’t laugh, but he nods approval.
After five, six drinks flow into me, I’m feeling less nervous, feeling that it’s only natural to distract armed guards from their duty. As if knowing this, Khun Bua clasps my shoulders and looks in my face. “Ajaan,” he says. With his free hand he points the shotgun across the uncovered lane of the highway. I look down the barrel and see the shoe factory.
At first my drunk eyes lack perspective and I see the factory as an electric city—the Manhattan skyscraper skyline suspended across rice fields and palm trees. Then the buildings shrink to their proper size. The factory lights reflect among the shallow waters in the rice fields, sparkling and rippling as the breeze blows the plants from side to side.
But I don’t understand what Khun Bua is trying to say. Irritated, he slaps at the shotgun in his lap. That doesn’t help my understanding at all, but the other men and Sorasak suddenly go nervous quiet.
Feeling to the need to refute whatever Khun Bua is saying, I stand up and shout “Mai chai.” No way. But Khun Bua ignores me as he waves the shotgun up and down the dike. For a moment, the barrel passes before my face, causing me to step back and trip on an empty whiskey bottle. Sorasak laughs nervously.
Khun Bua bends over me, the shotgun again pointed at my face. He’s so close to me that the few black whiskers on his chin and lips jump to my eyes. I try to focus on more than those hairs, but my eyes refuse to move. Everyone else merely waits. Waits to find out what Khun Bua will do.
But then, a shout rises from down the dike. The men around me jump up and grab their metal pipes before running toward the noise. Khun Bua hands the shotgun to another man, who chases after the others. Soon only Sorasak, Khun Bua, and myself remain.
Then the shotgun booms in the darkness, and Khun Bua laughs. “Nam jai,” he says, pressing his hand warmly against my chest. Water heart. I know the words, but don’t see how they mean anything in all this. Khun Bua then tells me there’s no problem. No problem at all.
Before the other men come back, Sorasak paddles me back to my house in his canoe. Khun Bua waves once before we disappear into the night.
When my father killed my mother, it was with a shotgun to the chest. I simply stood in shock as he caught her sleeping with my uncle. I hadn’t known what to do. So I simply watched as my father loaded the shotgun and fired.
After returning from the dike, I lay in bed thinking and realize that Khun Bua’s shotgun was old, not new like the one my father used. It was old and small and a single shot loader. Old and worn, but still fired again and again, shot after shot after shot, year after year after year.
The next morning, Loong Chian wakes me at six a.m. A hangover kicks behind my eyebrows and I tell him I don’t feel like messing, but Loong Chian insists we’re going to fix my sewage pipe.
“I could just wait out the floods,” I mutter. Loong Chian dismisses this. “You’re the one who implied direct action.”
“Stop repeating that.”
Loong Chian nods, then pulls a thin metal pipe from his boat. “I borrowed it from Khun Bua. They use these to beat people who try to break the dike.”
“How did it go last night?”
“Ah, we let a little water out, they shot a little at us. Great fun, huh?”
“You said they wouldn’t hurt you.”
“I said they wouldn’t hurt you. At least I hoped not—drunk men can do anything. Still, no harm.”
Loong Chian carries the pipe into my kitchen and begins heating one end of it over my propane stove.
“What does ‘nam jai’ mean?” I ask.
“Open hearted, water hearted, I don’t know how else to explain it.” Loong Chian pauses, as if this is the most important question he’s ever been asked. “For example, when I was growing up in Sa Klee, everyone was ‘nam jai.’ No one had much, but we shared what we had. We welcomed the floods, lived with them, farmed rice with them, helped each other, took care of each other.”
Loong Chian’s explanation doesn’t connect with Khun Bua’s use of the phrase, so I let the question go. Soon one end of the pipe is red hot. Loong Chain hands it to me. “It’s simple: melt through the sewage pipe, then attach the exhaust valve.”
I pull off my sandals and ease into the water. The mud squishes cool between my toes and the water laps my hair. I bob sideways to the sewage pipe, holding the hot little pipe outstretched above the water.
“Don’t breathe in the PVC fumes,” Loong Chian warns. “I doubt they’d be any good for you.”
I push the exhaust valve against the sewage pipe, mark where it needs to go with a wet thumbprint, then shove the hot pipe into the PVC. The plastic bubbles and oozes about the hot metal, smoking a blue haze. After going in a bit, the metal pipe cools off. Loong Chian reheats the pipe and I shove it through on the second try.
The hole explodes in sizzling muck, shooting the metal pipe out of my hand. A halo of liquid sewage arches from the hole. Bits of tissue and sewage water cling to my lips, right eyelid, right cheek. My skin tingles to the thought of thousands of imagined germs, to bacteria eating my flesh. I swim away from the pipe and thrash madly about, scrubbing my face in the muddy water.
“Make sure the hole’s big enough,” Loong Chain advises with a laugh. “Stick your finger in it and wiggle it around.”
I ignore him as the putrid fountain slowly drops down. Loong Chian gives me some tissue and I dry around the new hole, attach the exhaust pipe, then seal it with PVC cement.
The swirl of sewage in the floodwaters flows out until I can barely see it. Loong Chian walks upstairs and pours a small cup of water down the slanted ceramic toilet. The water flows easily down the pipe.
The floods are the worst in forty years, or so Loong Chian claims. The waters stay over the school grounds for two months.
After several weeks of nothing to do, I wade to the highway, catch a bus to the city near my village, then wade once again to the post office. I haven’t received any mail in a week because of the flooding and sure enough, when the postmaster waves me inside, we find a stack of my mail on a sorting table.
There are three postcards from my father. The first is empty of words. A bikini babe smiles from the front.
The next postcard—dated a week later—features three rambling, poorly written sentences on the irritations of trying to fit into life outside prison. The picture on the other side shows a standard shot of a beach at sunset.
The final postcard shows an aerial view of Gulf Shores after Hurricane Frederick struck back in 1979, with only sand and water where houses and businesses had been. In the middle of the devastation stands a lone cement block building. An arrow points to the building and says, “Souvenir City was the only survivor.”
On the back my father wrote: “Don’t let anyone ever take advantage of you.”
One day, towards the end of the floods, Loong Chian rows to my house with a bottle of whiskey. We drink it mixed with soda water while Loong Chian mentions past floods and past lives he’s had in the village.
“Must have been easier back then,” I ask.
“You would have thought so, huh?”
Loong Chian yells for Khun Bua to come drink with them. A minute later Khun Bua wades over and sits on the stairs.
“How’s the bathroom?” he asks in Thai.
Loong Chian laughs. After a week of use my toilet again overflowed. Turns out I’d merely drained half the pipe of sewage; any air bubble in the septic tank waited way low, way long, to be vented up and out—or so Loong Chian told me.
As we sat there, Khun Bua asked what I want from living and teaching here. I think about that, then ask Loong Chian in English what people here expect of me.
In response, Loong Chian chunks our half-empty whiskey bottle into the water next to his canoe. The bottle pops out of the water, then settles into an easy bob to the ripples bouncing off the canoe and the stairs.
“Get enough air inside and anything floats,” Loong Chian says.
“And?”
“And what? I can’t always have something to say.”
Hours later, the sun nears its horizon of soft-light browns as the mosquitoes and bats swarm after each other. Loong Chian and Khun Bua say goodbye for the night. As Loong Chian leaves, he laughs, telling Khun Bua that maybe we’ll have another try at the dike tonight. Khun Bua laughs, slaps me on the back and tells me good, good, that’s all good. We won’t shoot you much. Then they both wade home, leaving the whiskey bottle floating half in, half out of the water by my stairs.
Not going anywhere after all, it was.
***
This is the third installment of Jason Sanford's short story series. The other two can also be found in M&C's Original Writing section.
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