Grandad, There's A Head on the Beach

6.

There's something you need to know about the monsoons. They come. And they blow. And they go. It's not like a Robert Louis Stevenson story, where the biting wind blows blood-numbing sleet off the ocean for three months at a time. The southern monsoon season is more like a security guard at a gold necklace shop. Day after day nothing happens. Then suddenly two masked robbers burst in, firing guns and banging the guard over the head. They scoop up the necklaces and they're gone. Then it all goes back to nothing again. I got that one from Mair, but it's one of my favorites.

When I got to bed that night, there was no wind at all and the surf was soothingly soft. The first monsoon had passed and we were back to nothing. That was too bad because I needed a distraction. I needed crashing waves to drown out my thoughts. My brain was trying to convince the rest of me that I was over the hill. That I would never again feel the strong arms of a lover around me. Never again have a man snore in my ear. That, like the salt virgins of Xanadu, my vagina would seal itself up and I would become a fossil. The antidepressants weren't working. Or perhaps they weren't strong enough to counter my mega-midlife crisis. I took another two, washed down with Chilean red, and lay my head on the pillow. I couldn't be bothered to clean my teeth again, so I knew they'd be mauve in the morning. I needed a man, desperately. I needed to be admired, wanted, complimented, desired…loved. How difficult could that be? Village head Bigman Beung desired me, as did Major Mana. So there were precedents. I wasn't totally repulsive. All I needed to do was transfer that desire to a man with skin rather than scales.

Since I am a Thai woman, my culture discourages me from making the first move. But my culture is eroding as fast as the Gulf coastline. And I am a Thai woman raised by a liberated, free-thinking hippy mother. Unlike most Thais, I never fit in with groups. Relationships with my friends, whom I always felt were wary of my un-Thainess, evaporated on the last day of high school and then again the day after my university graduation. I had been encouraged to embrace the modern world and follow my instincts. Mair wouldn't have thought twice about being the aggressor when she was my age. Enough of being the tick on a blade of grass, hoping some hairy creature might brush past me. No, sir. Tomorrow I would go after my prey. It was a good plan and I felt confident. I might have even found sleep about then if it hadn't been for the headboard of my mother's bed banging against the wooden wall of her cabin.

I was in the new, barely used meeting room at the Pak Nam police station. They still hadn't removed the plastic wrapping from the chairs. It had taken me a while to get up to the second floor. I had been passed from man to man like a baton on my way up. Loitering was the activity of choice there. Officers old and new were leaning and sitting and standing at every corner, like statues in an ancient mansion. Nobody seemed to have a job. Those I knew, like Desk Sergeant Phoom, quickly introduced me to those I didn't, summarizing my entire life in twenty seconds and ending with the ubiquitous "She's single." But as they knew I was a reporter and therefore educated, "She's single" here was not intended as an invitation to date me, more a sorrowful postscript much in the vein of "She only has two months to live."

I was discreetly removing chair plastic with my nail scissors when Chompu threw open the door of the meeting room. He entered diva-like with the back of his hand on his forehead, slamming the door behind him. In order to get into the police force, Chompu had pretended to be straight at the interview, just as many other successful gay policemen had done before him. Some even married and produced children to compound the effect. But my Chompu had wanted to make a stand for camp. He believed that openly effeminate men had a role in the modern Thai police force and should not have to disguise what nature had given them. Consequently, he'd been transferred thirty-eight times in his career, and here he was at rock bottom. There was nowhere else to be transferred to. So Chompu could be himself and nobody really cared.

"Bad day at the office?" I asked. It was only nine A.M.

"They treat me like a dishrag," he said. "Honestly. I'm the only one actually working here, and nobody appreciates me. They've got their catfish ponds and their Five Star fried chicken concessions and their Amway-and who in their right mind would buy foundation cream from a man who plucks his nose hair in public, I ask you?-and actual policing is a troublesome diversion for most of them."

He plonked down in a padded chair I'd already liberated from plastic.

"Why didn't you want to meet in your office?" I asked.

"I don't have an office anymore. Not to myself, anyway. They put him in there-Egg, the fat man with the cat carcass on his head."

"What's he doing here?"

"Requested a transfer, they say. But pray tell me why anyone would ask to move here. He was in Pattani before."

"Well, excuse me, but that might just explain why he'd want to move here. Are you joking? Pattani? Muslims on motorcycles shooting harmless Buddhists. Buddhists on motorcycles shooting harmless Muslims. Pick off five of ours, and we'll pick off six of yours. Schools torched. Primary school teachers assassinated. It's the world center of cowards with weapons. Kill anyone as long as there's no danger of getting hurt yourself. It's the symbolism. They no longer value human life down there."

"Have you entirely finished?"

"Yes."

I hadn't really. There was so much I had to say about the deep south.

"Well, Senora Evita, if you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed I didn't question his reason for leaving Pattani. I asked why he'd want to come here to Thailand's own Pyong Yang when there are so many better moves he could have made. I sneaked a look at his transfer papers. He specifically requested Pak Nam, but he has no family connections here."

"Has he got a girlfriend?"

"Do you have no shame?"

"I'm not applying. I was just…"

"I know. I'm just being catty. Sorry."

"You don't like him, do you?"

"Well, apart from the fact that his short-wave radio is on ALL the time, you know what he did? You remember those darling little button ferns I had on the desk? He emptied them out the second-floor window, dirt and all."

"No!"

"Can you believe it? He said if he wanted to be in the jungle, he'd take a job with the border patrol. I'd nurtured those ferns. They were like children to me. Of course, they died immediately. They weren't used to the harsh world outside."

I took a tissue from my bag and handed it to him. I was just in time.

"He's a bully," I said.

Chompu nodded and wiped the tears from his eyes.

"I'm afraid of him," he said. "He talks so rudely to me. I daren't go in the office now."

"You've got a gun."

"You think I should?"

"Can't hurt. Most bullies are just friendless cowards. Nobody would miss him."

"Oh, but he has friends."

"How would you know?"

"Because according to the statement, he was having lunch with his buddies at eleven thirty yesterday."

"Were you doing surveillance on h- Wait! What statement?"

"The statement that was included in the investigation of your bombing. It was a hand grenade, by the way."

"Why would…? Don't tell me he provided an alibi for the rat brothers?"

"They're off the hook."

"I could see they were friendly when he came by our place the day they picked up the head. But why would he give them an-"

The door swung open, and Constable Mah Lek sauntered in with a tray of coffee cups and iced water.

"Sorry, folks," he said. "Had to wait for the water to boil. It's an old kettle. Sugar in the pot. Coconut cookies, but they're a bit old too."

He set his wares down on the table between us.

"Everything OK?" he asked.

"I'll recommend the service here to every criminal I know," I said.

He laughed and left us to it.

"Where were they supposedly having lunch?" I asked. "There'd have to be witnesses to corroborate it."

"Don't bother. They were at Egg's house. Just the three of them."

Convenient. Egg and the rats alone.

"He has a house?"

"On the way to the hospital."

"So he has other means. Like someone else I know."

"Don't lump me together with his type. My means are from a family heirloom."

"Accrued over hundreds of years of honest dealings with the common people, no doubt."

"Don't mock the wealthy. The only difference between your family and mine is that we were successful at business. We were competent."

"No argument there."

We sipped our Nescafe, and I wondered why instant coffee was classified as a drink.

"All right," I said at last. "Then we need a counter-witness who saw them in Maprao at the time of the explosion. You were interviewing the bystanders. Did anyone see the SUV?"

"No."

"Come on. We have twenty cars and trucks passing a day. Surely someone saw a big black wagon pass through."

"Not one."

"All right. Then they were driving one of their own cars. Did anyone see a strange slow-moving vehicle cruising the village?"

"No."

"A motorcycle with both riders in helmets?"

"No."

"Come on, Chom. You and the Keystone Kops were talking to the crowd for an hour. There were fifty-odd people there. Surely someone saw something? I watched Constable Mah Yai filling out a case form. Somebody was making a statement."

"Not about the bombing."

"Something else? What?"

"You know Ari?"

"The monkey handler? Who doesn't?"

"He filed a complaint."

"I bet it wasn't relevant."

"Someone's kidnapped his monkey."

If I was the UN, I'd pick up the phone and request a Thai/Burmese simultaneous interpreter. Twenty minutes later I'd have a girl in my office with a Ph.D. in both languages. I wasn't the UN, and I had no idea how to conduct a clandestine interview with Shwe the squid dryer. He supervised a team at Grajom Fy that laid out sandfish and baby squid on bamboo racks to dry under the hot sun. With the arrival of the monsoons, sunny periods were few, so the workers had to hurry out with their trays and be prepared to hurry them back under cover when the rains came. I know it sounds trivial, but some twenty thousand fish are sun-baked there every day. Someone was making a lot of money out of the operation, and it wasn't the Burmese.

There was just the one NGO working out of Pak Nam, and that was Rescue the Orphans Thailand. It was a branch of an international organization called Rescue the Orphans World that reputedly did some good…somewhere. I had yet to find that place. In my cynical mind they were every bit as bad as the SRM and a dozen other acronyms and ini-tialisms that claimed to be doing more than they were. They misled and leeched off the backs of other projects and took a lot of photos of things they weren't responsible for to send back to the ignorant church folks in the West. ROT was brazenly Christian. With every pill, every textbook, they'd issue a reminder to the orphans that if it wasn't for the great white God, they'd be illiterate or starving or dead. So howsabout a hymn?

But ROT was also one of the three places downtown with A/C (7-Eleven and the bank being the other two), so I strolled into their office. I'd heard they had a Burmese working there who spoke English. There were four desks, and they were all empty. A tall man in a yellow T-shirt, yellow trousers, and a yellow peaked cap was sitting on the floor cutting out yellow paper chains. Yellow seemed to be in this year. He looked fearfully in my direction.

"Hello," I said in English.

"Sawat dee," he said badly in Thai.

He remained seated on the ground, perhaps believing I'd come to the wrong place.

"Do you speak English?" I asked.

"Yes."

"I need to speak to a Burmese worker. Can you translate for me?"

"Yes."

I wondered whether this was one of those gag scenes where the person you're speaking to only knows the word yes.

"Where did you learn your English?" I asked.

"I graduated from the University of Rangoon many moons ago. I was an English major. Not frightfully useful in my present circumstances, I might add."

All right, he could speak. He sounded like a leftover from the British Raj, but he could speak. My problem then for the next fifteen minutes, as we locked the office and drove my truck to Grajom Fy, was shutting him up. He was his own favorite subject. I could tell you all about his life, but it would really be a huge chunk of unnecessary narrative. So all you need to know is that his name was Clive. His portfolio in Pak Nam had nothing to do with orphans. He was here to initiate AIDS-awareness programs for the Burmese community. AIDS was still good charity, and even though there were far more pressing problems for the Burmese in Thailand, AIDS was what got Iowan and Indianan church folk dipping into their pockets. So, despite the fact he had no medical training and couldn't speak Thai, his command of the English language for some reason made him the ROT representative in Pak Nam. In his yellow ROT uniform the Burmese could see him coming half a kilometer away, but I wondered how they viewed him. With his education, I imagined he'd be something of an outsider. And would Shwe be comfortable with Clive as an interpreter?

We found Shwe among the vast spread of sunning tables laying out sandfish on racks like neat torture victims. All began well. The two were acquainted. They exchanged smiles and greetings. Shwe nodded curiously at me and told Clive a quick story, which I'm certain involved my underwear. Clive's brown cheeks turned claret. We retired to the shade of a huge deer's ears tree and sat on large plastic buoys.

"What would you care to know?" Clive asked, still too embarrassed to look me in the eye.

"Last night I was asking a group what they knew about Burmese bodies being washed up on the beach. Shwe had something to say, but the others there wouldn't let him tell me. I want to know what he knows."

Clive's translation and the subsequent discussion in Burmese took some time, and I thought I was about to be excluded until Clive sighed and looked at his knees.

"Well, goodness," he said. "One is never too old for an education. I am flummoxed to learn of these things. It would appear that there have been numerous disappearances from amidst the Burmese. All unexplained. A husband would fail to return from his toil in the plantation. A workmate might stop by his associate's dormitory only to discover the door open and the bedding unperturbed. A fishing boat captain might be overwhelmed that a good and steadfast mate had failed to turn up for his shift. In the past year alone there have been thirty such incidences of whom he knows."

"Were they reported to the police?" I asked.

Clive passed on the question.

"In the case of a Burmese being registered and having a Thai sponsor," Clive said, "the employer would go to the police station to report that one of his workers had vanished mysteriously. The response would invariably be that the Burmese are a notoriously unreliable race and the worker probably found some other place of employ that offered a more substantial stipend. There was, however, no explanation as to why he would be of a mind to leave behind his clothes, possessions, and, in some cases, his Burmese ID card and money."

"Is there a theory as to where these missing workers may have gone?" I asked.

Another dialogue.

"There are tales," said Clive. "Seafarers" yarns about deep-sea slave ships. Vessels whose crews work under armed guard, never paid. Subsistence rations. Torture and cruelty. Out at sea for a month transferring their catch to smaller boats. No way to tell of their plight. And in case of a mutiny, a bullet to the head."

"Or a machete to the neck," I added.

"Quite so. Nobody has ever returned from such cruises."

"So, if nobody returns…?"

"Hmm. I shall inquire."

The Burmese chatted. In the middle of their conversation Shwe's left leg started to play the Thai national anthem. He laughed and rolled up his trouser cuff. There, taped to his calf was a cell phone in a holster. He switched it off. He obviously wasn't about to calmly hand over his phone to the police. Necessity was the mother of invention.

"There is no cement evidence," Clive said. "But the slices fit together to make the cake. The account from a drunken Thai crew member. The sight of a man being bundled into a truck. Missing Burmese. Body parts found on a beach…"

"So there have been other parts?"

"Again, rumors."

It wasn't any type of tale a journalist would touch with a long bamboo pole. The Internet was full of this stuff. Not a shred of evidence.

"Why wouldn't Aung want me to hear this?" I asked.

"For the same reason you won't write about it," he said.

Shwe smiled.

He was right. I was a journalist in spirit. There might be facts I could follow up on, statistics, hospital records and the like, but I wouldn't get much from the Burmese. Why would they want to bring a rock face down on themselves? Who'd volunteer to have his precarious life crushed by getting involved in an investigation into a bunch of unsubstantiated claptrap? The missing were missing. The dead were dead. The police didn't care. Protect yourself and your kin, that's the way of it. I asked whether Shwe knew anything about the head on our beach. He said he didn't, but he'd ask around.

I drove Clive back to Pak Nam, and he was pleasantly quiet. I assumed this was his inauguration into the horror of life for the poor fisherfolk. This wasn't the yellow-paper-chain world, or the world of asexual hand-puppets telling each other to use a condom. This was the world where people got eliminated. There was no evidence, but I could tell that he believed what he'd heard. When he stepped out of the Mighty X, I asked him how he knew Shwe.

"I consult with him from time to time," he said. "He used to be the head of urology at the East Yangon General Hospital."

"So what's he doing here drying fish?" I asked, although I was sure I knew the answer already.

"The poor blighter has a son back home with muscular dystrophy. In his old job he didn't make enough to medicate the boy. This pays twice as much."

All this excitement and it wasn't even lunchtime. Just as well because I was supposed to be the one making it. I don't know how I ended up with kitchen duty, but it was by far the hardest job in the household. Mair looked after the shop, which was currently Kosovo. Arny minded the chalets, all but one of which were empty. Grandad Jah watched traffic. I made breakfast, lunch, and dinner and solved world problems. You can see where all the pressure fell in our family.

I pulled into the car park and saw a crowd standing around the latrines. Nobody was doing anything. They just stood by the concrete block, staring like tourists at the pyramids. It didn't occur to me at first, but as I walked down to the beach, I noticed some geometric anomaly with regard to our public loos. The entire block was leaning at a thirty-degree angle. When I reached the scene, the problem was clear. The sea had claimed the entire beach right up to the crest. The water was scooping out the foundations of our toilet block wave by wave. We weren't talking tsunami here. This was a deceptively gentle rise of the tide. To my left, the polite surf was already lapping at the top step of the front cabin. The plants bobbed up and down in their plastic pots. The picnic table was sub-aqua. In the four hours since I'd left, our resort had become Venice. Captain Kow was right. Earth was in the process of wreaking revenge on its abusers.

As King Canute discovered to his chagrin, there isn't a lot you can do to turn back the sea. We stood and watched. Our kitchen, farther inland, had a thirty-centimeter wash, and the carport was a quay. But this was a kindly reminder from Mother Nature that we lived beside several trillion liters of water. If it wanted us, it could have us any old time. I stood beside Mair as the toilets dipped another four degrees.

"Should I get buckets?" she asked.

I laughed and she smiled. It wasn't inconceivable that one day our entire resort would become Atlantis and they'd make TV documentaries about us. But today all I could think of was Grandad Jah unblocking the U bend on a toilet that was now deep beneath the surf. Like I said, the monsoons had a sense of humor.

We had lunch that day crammed around the bamboo table on the veranda of my cabin. I hadn't had a chance to tell anyone my findings about the Noys. Noy genius had embedded herself beside Arny. I had no idea what chemistry would draw a future Nobel prize scientist to a man who shaved his buttocks. She was so in love with him I didn't have the heart to mention that my brother's fiancee would be back from Hong Kong the next day. I really didn't want to tell her that Kanchana Aromdee, three times national bodybuilding champion, could easily rip Noy's skinny arms out of their sockets. And I didn't want to point out that Arny was not flirting with Noy in the least. Didn' t even understand the concept. He was just being his sweet, honest self. But, in fact, I knew I'd have to point all this out because Noy, alias Thanawan, had enough problems already and the last thing she needed was a broken heart. I'd wait for an appropriate moment.

"What do you intend to do about your toilet block?" Mamanoy asked.

"I was thinking we might issue snorkels and goggles to customers asking to use the bathroom," I said.

"I must say you're all taking this remarkably calmly," she said.

"You know where your cheeks are, but that doesn't stop you biting the inside of your mouth from time to time," said Mair, looking out to sea.

We all nodded. None of us had any idea what that meant, but our guests had obligingly learned to surf my mother's squalls. They were becoming family. I wanted them to stay. Having found out what had happened in the States, I knew I'd never sleep again if I couldn't make some sense of it. I didn't want to scare them off by asking directly. I needed a ploy to squeeze information out of young Noy drip by drip without her realizing what I was doing.

In order to obtain their trust, I decided to share my Burmese findings with them. Severed head stories aren't always the best accompaniment to a meal, but the Noys appeared to take them all in bon gout. I went on to list the indignities our Burmese neighbors were experiencing day in day out in our land of smiles. Then I even added the myth of the slave ships and the alleged execution of mutineers. By the time my tale was told, all eyes were on me, and only I had a full plate.

"Serves 'em right," said Grandad Jah.

"For what?" I asked.

"Turning against the British," he said.

I was surprised the old man knew the first thing about regional history.

"Stick with the Brits," he went on, "and you've got a royal family at your back. Can't beat royalty for political stability."

I wondered whether to point out that Thailand had entertained no fewer than thirty-nine prime ministers since 1932, seventeen of whom were planted after military coups. But you never won an argument with Grandad, even when you were right.

"The Malays stuck with the Brits," he said. "The Indians. The Australians. And look at all them. Democracy is government by the people. These countries aren't run by halfwits in tin hats bleeding their countries of all their natural resources and treating their citizens like unpaid coolies. If they'd just stuck with the Brits, we wouldn't have any Burmese on Thai soil. Not a one. We'd be sending our laborers over there to build high-rises and roads."

Grandad was a man who generally dribbled words sparingly. On the few occasions he let the floodgates open, you appreciated those dribbly moments that much more.

"That's really sad," said Mair.

"Just pay attention to the lessons learned from history," said Grandad.

"They can't even count," said Mair.

We all paused.

"Who can't count, Mair?" Arny asked.

"The Burmese children," she replied. "And they're so adorable in their little clothes and powdery cheeks. It hadn't occurred to me that they weren't in school. I shall build one.

"Mair, you aren't nearly connected enough for a Nobel prize, and will you stop spending all this money we don't have?" I pleaded. "We can't even afford to clean up the shop or salvage the latrine from beneath the mighty ocean, let alone set up a school."

"It shouldn't cost much," she said, her mind already seeing the smiling faces sitting in the front row, the hands raised, the queue for the pencil sharpener. "We could hire ourselves a little teacher. A Burmese teacher wouldn't cost very much. And we could drive over to Ranong and buy books, and I could teach Thai once a week, or sewing."

And off she went, describing her Burmese school, the Noys smiling and offering suggestions, Grandad Jah grumbling that nobody ever listened to him and collecting the lunch plates, Arny smiling like the little boy whose mother told fantastic stories to three little children with no father. And me, unappreciated, carrying the worries of the world. I reached into my pocket, palmed two antidepressants and washed them down with the last of my Coca-Cola. And to my utter surprise, with my mother sitting to my left yakking on about blackboard paint, a familiar sound emerged from Mair's cabin next door. It was the sound of a headboard clattering against a wooden wall.