“Frogs? What are you talking about frogs? Those noises are from a tiger…or maybe a few of them…Right! Let’s go check it out.” Johnny donned his tiger hunting uniform of boxers and boots and we unlocked the door with the tiny skeleton key.
Johnny carried the protective bottle of JD and I carried the thin candle.
An uncontrollable giggle escaped from Johnny and we were trying to keep from waking the other people sleeping in the guesthouse. We tiptoed down the corridor and struggled to keep from laughing as the wooden staircase made noises like some exaggerated Alfred Hitchcock movie set.
Stepping outside we looked to the left and the right. Both directions showed dark fields covered with water and loud tigers huffing and puffing into the humid night.
“Which way?” I decided to leave it to Johnny.
“This way. Follow me.” Johnny stepped into the six-inch mud to the left, then stopped to remove his boots and put them on the guesthouse doorstep. “These boots are too loud, they’ll scare off all the tigers.” I pulled my boots off too. “
Hey, I just remembered something… wait here” Barefoot the stairs made less noise. I stepped back into the room and grabbed one of the half dozen joints I’d rolled earlier after buying about an ounce of Lao weed from a 90-year-old Yao tribeswoman who was selling hand made bracelets, opium, and giant bags of weed. It cost an amazing 70 cents and had us both stoned enough to be drunkenly hunting tigers in our underwear.
Back down the steps and bringing the light to the doorway I found that Johnny had stepped off into the muck a good twenty feet and was creeping further despite the immense dark. “ Come on mate…blow out that candle and the stars soon light the way.” I lit the joint and blew out the candle.
“Here…trade me that bottle for this” I handed the joint to my partner and received the quarter full bottle in return. Hitting and swigging we continued further into the ooze with the stars gradually lighting the way.
The noise nearly always stopped as we neared it.
“Tigers are smart,” I said, “ They want to lure us away from civilization.”
“Crap…that’s the end of the whiskey,” Johnny hurled the empty bottle out into the dark. It made the expected splash in the expected direction and seconds later a second splash, much closer accompanied by a deep grunt in the opposite direction.
We turned, seeing the large four-legged shape approaching us. It’s large body moving with grace through the mud. We stepped towards the guesthouse and broke into a run, side by side, feeling the pulse pound in our heads, hoping that the beast would allow us to make it back to the safety of our room. Leaving our boots at the front door and tracking mud up the stairs and through the corridor until, finally, we were behind the closed door, locking it, and breathing heavily.
Lighting another joint, Johnny also lit a candle. We were covered in filthy mud with our boxers simply another gray brown patch on our bodies. We looked at each other and began to laugh. We shared stories about the terrible tiger until the false dawn when looking out the window; we realized the horrible truth of our situation.
“It seems that it wasn’t a tiger”, Johnny said blandly.
“Nor a bullfrog,” I replied.
Neither of us felt a need to say more as we looked at the footprints leading into the pigpen outside the window.
Homecoming
(This story was both told to and witnessed by me as I stayed at a guesthouse near the hilltribe villages)
Star looked at the tiny girls around her.They were doing their best to look fashionable and appealing. It made her smile at first, before she realized why they went to so much trouble. The tiny ripped t-shirts held with colorful handmade ropes wrapped around the body creating a sort of Paris in the village look. A little girl with a sweet face in a purple t-shirt carrying her baby brother who was nearly the same size as her stopped to readjust him on her side.
“Sabadee” she said when she saw Star standing at the edge of the village. ”Sabadee Mai.” You Good. You good, right?
“Sabadee” Star said, hearing the difference between the 6-year-old Lao villager and the 26 year old Bangkok bar girl. “Sabadee Mai.” “Sab-ah-deee.” The girl replied. Her inflection was so high and birdlike. So beautiful. Her tiny brother slept through the whole exchange even as he was shifted on her side.
“Do you know I used to live around here?” Star asked in English.
“You and me are probably related but I look like some exotic foreigner to you. I probably represent everything you dream of… or at least you think I do…” she shuddered again, remembering the day she left her village 17 years before.
The Thai man had driven to the village in a large black Mercedes. It was rare to see any sort of motorized vehicle besides the occasional Chinese tractor. Most of the people in the village came to stand behind the protective gate of the village as the stranger got out of his car, surrounded by three large men in dark suits. Star’s mother had called her inside the hut and done a quick combing of her hair. She took a glass necklace on twisted rope from her own neck and put it around her little girls.
“La korn, kong koi.” Star remembered her confusion as her mother said goodbye. “Where am I going?” she thought. Maybe her mother was going to take a trip. She’d run outside to where the villagers were now surrounding the four Thai men. The important man noticed her immediately as she pushed through the crowd.
“Well, hello little Star. Where did you come from?” She had recognized some of the Thai words but they had been so much harsher than she was used to hearing, even though the tone was gentle. She stopped and looked at the ground. “Sabadee!” She had said softly.
“Five hundred baht for her.” He told the crowd. “Who is selling this child?” She remembered the low murmur that swept through the crowd as he named such an extravagant price for just one child. The other girls he had already bought looked jealously on the new one, their friend, who commanded such a high price. Her value exceeded theirs combined.
She remembered the secret feeling of pride when they told her that on the way to their new home in Bangkok. Her mother had stepped forward and collected the money. Suddenly, the rich woman in the village. And now, here was Star, the rich foreigner visiting the village.
She looked at the girl and tried to remember her mother’s name. She tried to remember her own name, her family name, anything besides the name Star which had stuck with her since she left, but all she could pull up was the memory of that last day in her village. Somewhere around here. Somewhere in the Golden Triangle.
A crowd of children was now standing around her. Mostly girls with pretty sarongs wrapped around their wastes. The boys stood a bit in the distance…shy of this exotic stranger in jeans and a lace tank top. She smiled and joked with them aware of the harshness of her Thai accent as compared with the low bird sounds they answered in.
“Are you a Thai?” a young boy asked “Are you looking for girls to take to Bangkok? Hey, I’ll go get my sisters..wait…” he ran off even as she began to explain.
“I’m Lao. I used to live around here and now I am here to visit and to see if I can find my mom. I don’t want to buy anyone. Okay?” When had her voice changed so much? Why did they look at her like she was so strange?
An old woman in a tiny hut looked out over trays of homemade sticky sweets wrapped in pastel colored plastic. Star walked over and bought two handfuls and began to hand them out to grubby little hands frantically reaching for them.