“Great, let’s wait a minute and they’ll send him packing.” Pound, pound, pound. We heard him beating on the door. “Johnny is that you?” Johnny gave me a quick wink.
“No, it’s Eric. Evie, you are Belgian and I am Belgian and you must let me fuck you tonight. Open the door.”
“Let’s go get him,” Johnny and I bolted out the door and around the corner in time to see Eric stagger off the porch and along the edge of the cliff that the girl’s bungalow overlooked.
“Go to bed, Jerk.” Evie called after him.
He was twenty-five or thirty feet from us when he disappeared. One moment we could see him lurching along the ledge. The next he was gone. His shadow replaced with a loud thud and a splash seconds later as his body landed on the hard clay at the bottom and rolled into the stream.
“Holy shit,“ Johnny ran towards the spot Eric had disappeared from. “Evie, do you have a flashlight.”
Evie screamed. “Oh my god. Do you think he’s dead? He fell off the cliff. Oh my God. I hope he’s not dead.”
“I hope he is.” Laila came outside. “Serves him right. He’s been treating every woman here like we’re whores. I hope he’s dead.”
“We’ve got to go get him.” Evie handed Johnny the flashlight she’d retrieved from inside.
“Yes we must go get him.” Johnny shined the light down the bottom of the cliff. We could see the Belgian lying face down in the tiny stream. He’d apparently landed on the barbed wire fence before hitting the ground and one arm and a leg were twisted into unnatural positions and held upright by the sagging strands.
“Leave him, let him die. Rude prick.” Laila was serious.
Johnny was already starting over the ledge, using the flashlight to find hand and footholds. “Someone go get a rope. I saw one under the restaurant earlier. We’ll need it to pull him up. Chris would you hold the torch for me?”
I reached down and grabbed the proffered flashlight. Someone else went to get the rope.
The whole process took about an hour. Five people were needed to drag the fat, unconscious man up the cliff. Each tug dragging him against the face of the cliff, and adding to the bruises on his face and arms.
“Tie it around his neck,” Laila had called down to Johnny as he cinched the rope around the man’s waist and up over his shoulders in an improvised harness. When we got him to the top, Debbie, gave him a quick examination. She worked as a nurse in Brisbane. She popped an ammonia capsule under his nose. He woke with a start.
“Oh my god. Where am I?” he began to cry like a fat 10 year old. “What has happened to me?”
“You got what you deserved,” I couldn’t help myself.
“I want you to move your fingers for me, can you do that? Good. Now what about your feet? Can you lift your legs? Good. What about your neck, does it feel alright? Can you sit up? Good, I think you’re okay. Some cuts and bruises, but you’re really lucky. You should go get yourself some bandages, go to bed, and think about how lucky you are to be here with good people who save your life even though you’ve been a complete jerk. I want you to remember that. You’re really very lucky.”
Debbie got up and left the Belgian sitting on the ground.
“Has anyone seen my glasses? Do you know where my glasses are? I can’t see anything without them. I have no extras.”
“Guess you’ll have to find them yourself, pal.” I fought the urge to kick him. I wanted to throw the blubbering old man back down the hill.
I walked to Evie’s porch where Johnny lit the big doobie. Evie, Laila, Johnny, and I watched as Eric lumbered down the trail back to his room.
“We should of left him down there,” this time it was me who said it.
“No, it’s good that we brought him up. Maybe he had to learn a lesson. I feel sort of bad for him now,” Laila had softened after his crying.
“I wonder what he will say to us tomorrow?”
When morning came the Belgian was gone. Eric had not paid his bill and had stolen several bottles of Mekong whiskey from the restaurant. The owner wanted to know when the last time anyone had seen him, but no one could remember anything past seeing him drinking in the restaurant. It was just too hard to explain the whole thing.
I walked to the cliff. Daylight revealed it to be nearly forty feet with a slight slope towards the bottom. I could see where the Belgian had landed and finally come to rest in the creek. The large glasses lay just under the water, the sun reflecting underneath the ripples of the creek.
Tourist Trap
The hill tribes were howling in the villages as the lightning crashed and the thunder boomed over the humid subtropical night in Northern Laos.I stood on the bamboo porch of my tiny bungalow listening as the rain began to fall and the musky smell of the newly wet earth permeated some ancient memory locked in the recesses of my brain.
The monkey mind is a funny thing, especially trapped within a human being that denies its monkeyness a thought. Hidden away beneath the veneer of a civilized human being the beast still lingers and it’s not entirely inconceivable that sometimes the beast escapes and takes over the host completely abolishing all thoughts of work, clothing, and human society.
I felt the beast rising within me. I felt that curious feeling of fear mixed with anticipation, an unknown longing for something simpler, more savage, and less safe.
Not so strange really. I’d come to Laos in search of the same thing, though I hadn’t realized it until a few days before when I found myself crawling up into an 80-year old Akha tribesman’s hut to smoke opium.
The man had beckoned to me with betel stained teeth from the trapdoor in the floor of his jungle den. The house itself stood on six foot stilts and was about twenty by thirty feet. It was made of an unidentifiable hardwood that was so weathered it matched the gray brown color of the dirt along the village paths. It was covered in disturbingly twisted brambles woven into magical symbols to ward off hexes from angry demons or jealous neighbors.
My host was as weathered as the house he presided over. His hair had that bowl cut look of the Yanomami when they pose for pictures in National Geographic. His eyes were small and black. He looked more like a Mexican than an Asian Tribesman. He wore a roughly woven sarong in bright reds and greens that contrasted oddly to his withered and dusky skin. Besides this festive garment his only ornamentation was the necklaces and bracelets made of jagged shells, teeth, and sinister red and black beads.
I had felt pensive climbing the ladder through the small door, wondering if the swift strike of a machete would separate my body from my head. I continued climbing, seeing, and smelling the sour and fecal smell that got stronger as I pulled myself into the opium den. There were no windows, a half dozen candles were lit throughout the room and I could see shadowy figures lying on straw mats with triangular pillows under their arms as other shadowy figures held pipes to their heads and brief flares of fire turned the tarry substance to an orange ember.
I was led thorough a maze of bodies resting while their mental occupants visited various levels of Euphoria. They were all Lao; I was the only foreigner that I could see.
Reaching an empty mat, I assumed the position of the forms around me, lying on my left side with the pillow under my arm and body propping me into an upright position. The old man muttered in the strange Acka opium speak. His words a hissing and guttural whisper. He lifted the water pipe to my mouth and lit a phosphorous match.
I inhaled and felt as if I were lifting just slightly from the cushion I rested on. My body didn’t seem so heavy as I rolled my eyes back in my head and imagined a smoke dragon filling up my lungs and spreading throughout the rest of my cellular fiber.