“I was beautiful, and soft and warm and sweetly formed, with golden skin and long black hair,” said Tuppence, who had suddenly turned Oriental. “And I wanted Dhang and would have gone with him, and just as he was on the point of making a woman of me…”
“Just as I was on the point of taking her,” Dhang said, “just then her father came into the room, and furious he was, and they put me in that room and beat the soles of my feet with long strips torn from old auto tires, and hung me up so that I had to stand on the tips of my toes, and told me they would cut off my purick, and swore they would cut off my head as well. I did not try to rape her, for she wanted me as I wanted her, and I would have been tender with her-”
“Evan, baby, I get the feeling that Dhang here is up tight sexually. You tell him to forget it, dig? He’s a sweet little cat and all, but if you could tell him that this is just not my scene-”
“Heaven, friend, the black woman is your woman, yes? You said that you would get a woman for me, Yevan. I feel myself tortured and torn apart by demons. I will not touch the black woman, Evan, but I ache with desire and yearning. Yevan…”
The old man was riding on water skis pulled by a blazing bullock. Fire danced in his hair. He sang the “Marseillaise” at the top of his voice and poured kerosene over himself and burned without being consumed. Then the bullock veered sharply to its right, and the burning old man bore down upon us, capsizing our boat, and the entire river turned into a sheet of icy flame.
“You should never have run away from us,” Barclay Houghton Hewlitt whispered in my ear. “Don’t you ever go down to the end of the town unless you go down with me.” I looked at him, and he turned into Abel Vaudois. “A good idea,” he said sagely. “To grow opium poppies in the Jura, separate it from Switzerland, and sell the poppies to American veterans for Memorial Day. Is this not a typical American breakfast?” I agreed that it was, and he grinned like the Cheshire cat and turned into the Chief. “That’s a good cover story,” he said, “but you’ll need a cover story for it and then another cover story for that cover story, and we’ll put them all together and bind them as a book and put your name on the cover. Now wait a moment,” he said, and he stepped around the corner and locked the dugout in the men’s room of Kennedy Airport. I grabbed the locked door and began banging furiously on it, but it wouldn’t open. I drew my pistol and shot at the lock, and the bullets bounced off and released clouds of cyanide gas, and I breathed it in and gasped, and the men’s room taxied down the runway and was airborne, and we soared high over the blue Pacific until a divine hand reached out to snare us with a butterfly net and drag us down, down, down into an ocean of inky blackness.
“I think he’s coming out of it,” a soft voice said. “Him come out of big sleep. Oh, the hell with it.”
I opened my eyes. Tuppence was leaning solicitously over me; Dhang was looking over her shoulder. We seemed to be on dry land. I started to sit up, but they both reached to push me back down and told me to save my strength.
“I’m all right,” I said. And I was. The fever was gone now. I groped for memory and couldn’t get the handle of it. I did not know where we were or how we had gotten there.
“What happened?”
“We almost lost you,” Tuppence said. “Baby, you were in very bad shape. Feverish, and seeing things that weren’t there, and talking to people who weren’t around. All kinds of crazy languages. Dhang couldn’t understand you, and neither could I. And Dhang and I couldn’t understand each other, either, which made things like interesting. I tried to teach him a little English, but it didn’t take very well. The only words he knows are the kind that get you thrown out of places. Did you teach him?”
“I guess so. Tuppence-”
“You hungry, baby? There’s some fish baking. Dhang’s pretty cute at catching fish. I guess it’ll be done in a minute. He’s got this way of cooking it, you dig a hole and build the fire on top of the fish, and you have them all wrapped up in leaves-”
“I know. It’s his one recipe.” I sat up and looked around at the two of them and the fire and, a few yards off to the side, the river. Our boat was beached on the bank.
“How long was I like that? A couple of hours?”
“Oh, wow.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Would you believe three days, baby?”
“Frankly, no. Was I-”
“Three days. If we cut out of Tao Dan on Monday, then this is Thursday afternoon. Except that I sort of lost track of the days in Tao Dan, so it could be anything. But it’s been three days. We just went on floating down the river all the time. Dhang kept turning up with things to eat, and we got a little water into you now and then but no food. Feed a cold and starve a fever, or is it the other way around? But whatever it was, you were in no kind of condition to eat anything.”
“How did you and Dhang manage?”
“Sign language, mostly. Tell you the truth, I was pretty useless most of the time. I did a little paddling, but he took care of the hard part, like pulling up on shore for the night and making the fires and scaring up something to eat. We took turns staying up with you. You don’t remember any of it?”
“Bits and pieces.” I drew a breath. I was suddenly ravenous and I turned to Dhang, who had been maintaining a respectful silence. “About that fish,” I said in Khmer.
“It will be ready soon, Heaven.”
“Good.”
“Your soul left your body and soared through the open reaches of the universe, Evan. But the woman and I waited for your soul to return, and from time to time it came back. The woman is good. She washed your head with water and helped me with your hair.”
“My hair?”
He lowered his eyes. “It is gone, Evan.”
I put my hand on the top of my head. Nothing – I was as bald as a newly laid egg. I looked at Tuppence, who was trying bravely not to giggle. I said, “What the hell?”
“It fell out in handfuls,” she said. “Must have been the fever. You looked pretty patchy there for a while. You would lose some here and some there, you know, and you got to be something of a sight.”
“I can imagine.” I ran my hands over my bald dome. “Dhang said you helped him with my hair. What’s he talking about?”
“I’m not sure myself. We both gathered up all the hair as soon as it fell out, and at night we burned it in the fire. Very bloody tribal.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. He was very tense about it, and I figured like maybe he knew something.”
I asked Dhang. It seemed to have some deep religious significance, but either he couldn’t explain it or I couldn’t follow him. He seemed to feel that I owed my recovery at least in part to the ordeal by fire through which my hair had passed. For all I knew, he was right, so I didn’t argue.