Bible of the Dead by Tom Knox Read Free Book Online Page B

Lao, the Khmer Rouge, all the communists; he was a wiry determined old guy, maybe an ex fighter, Jake suspected – certainly he was toughly contemptuous of everyone and everything. Yet likeable.
    Jake had been told Yeng was Hmong Bai , Striped Hmong, one of the most rebellious and warlike of Hmong tribes. Jake could see his motivation.
    But why would Chemda be so audacious, so foolhardly? The cops in Ponsavanh were truly menacing; rustic and clumsy, but definitely menacing. If he and Chemda got caught doing this, with the prime suspect for the murder – Tou – they would of course be immediately deported, if not arrested and imprisoned. And very probably they would be beaten. Badly.
    Yet Chemda’s dark and serene Khmer face was impassive; only the tiniest tic of nerves showed in the corner of her eyes. Nothing else.
    Frustrated, Jake looked out of the window, wary and nervy.
    The old jeep was rumbling along lanes which were little better than cattle-tracks. Wooden houses of Hmong villagers lined the way, large wooden rice barns stood beside the laurel trees and the elephant grass. Some of the barns had strange metal struts supporting their thatched or iron roofs, fat pillars of steel curving to a point.
    With a jolt – a physical jolt as the ancient American jeep vaulted a crack in the sunbaked muddy track – Jake realized the pillars in the rice barns were bomb cases . The Hmong were using bomb cases to construct their barns: there was obviously so much unexploded ordnance around here, so many old bombs and shells and grenades providing so much metal, the swidden-farming Hmong were scavenging the stuff for buildings.
    And now Jake looked closer he could see American hardware everywhere: rusty shell-cases used as flower pots. Metres of corrugated tank tracks utilized for fences. Huge bombs sliced in half and employed as water troughs for oxen.
    ‘Why don’t you tell me? Why are you taking this risk?’
    It was Chemda, at last. She had spoken. Her brown eyes secured his gaze; her expression was demure, clever, and opaque.
    ‘’Cause I want the story,’ he said. ‘I want to get a decent story for once in my life.’
    ‘You want it that badly?’
    ‘That badly.’
    ‘And that’s it? Just that?’
    Jake paused. Obviously Chemda sensed there was more: and she was right. But he couldn’t tell the truth. Could he?
    Two little Hmong boys ran uncaringly in front of the car chasing a rooster – the car slowed just enough not to kill them, then speeded again. He thought of his sister, killed by a car. The guilt was a burn on his brain, an ugly scar, never properly healed. He thought of his mother, and his sister, and their deaths: and the absence of femininity in his life.
    Living his life was like living in a jail, like being in the army. Everything was crudely masculine. It was all beers and jokes and danger and ambition and cynical laughter with Tyrone. Maybe he needed some real femininity in his life. Maybe he already craved the elegant, clever, refined, mesmeric femininity of this Khmer girl, to fill the hole in his life, the hole like a bomb crater left by a war.
    He didn’t know what he wanted.
    They were headed deeper into the rough. The broken shallow hills where the lethal golden ‘bombies’ slept, un exploded, beneath the pine trees: like fallen Christmas baubles of death.
    ‘All my life,’ Jake said, at last, ‘I’ve wanted danger and risk. The adventure. And yes, the story.’
    She eyed him.
    ‘But why? What drives that?’
    Her gaze was shrewd, even knowing. Jake now felt an enormous urge to confess : just get it out, cough it, purge the pain. Puke up the poison like when he was a teenager, drinking too much, drinking the pain away, with the room spinning: best to go and throw up.
    ‘My sister died when she was five. Run over.’
    ‘God. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Don’t say that. Everyone says that, it’s bollocks.’
    ‘OK. OK. And?’
    ‘My mum was more broken than any of us. She was Irish, Irish