That Savage Water by Matthew R. Loney Read Free Book Online Page B

in? You want feel sex ten minutes cheap price? – her hand shoots up the leg of my boxer shorts.
    ï£§What? Jesus Christ. No.
    From the empty hallway, the first light of dawn already seeps like grey dishwater. She came directly from the street or wanting a few more bucks after the last traveller upstairs or next door.
    ï£§Come on – she pleads at me softly – Only ten minutes. Why you don’t want?
    I close the door in her face. Like a stray dog, her biscuit dropped and sagging tail. It’s not worth the potential damage. Door to door, so early and barefoot. I wonder where she came from, who she finds next, what her options are and if I’ve just exhausted them.
    Khoi sighs and says – Now Cambodia have many problem. But before, Cambodia have big problem.
    He walks to the edge of the wooden deck and looks out over the lake at the distant lights of the Tuol Kork district. The hyacinth continents drift and gather, a Pangaea dispersing and congealing according to tide and surface winds. Boeng Kak, the urban lake and stagnant bladder of Phnom Penh.
    ï£§The Khmer Rouge?
    Khoi half smiles – Why does every tourist like so much the Khmer Rouge? Every day they want to see Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng prison. Sometime I think Khmer Rouge is very good for Cambodia.
    Politely, sarcastically, empathetically, I laugh – And the tourists?
    ï£§They just tourists, you know. They have lots of money, they give our place good business. I work at this guesthouse so I don’t mind about tourists. This is my job, you know, to pay for school, to get good money. Then I will travel to America and Portugal, one day even Uganda!
    The hyacinth clumps pause in their break from the wooden posts. The water laps as Khoi says – My father die, you know. I live with my mother, my grandmother, two sister, two brother. Khmer Rouge come and look in our house, under the floor. They say we keep too much rice, they say we hide it. My father tell them no, but they keep looking for rice. They can’t find it, you know, because we don’t have. Then they take my father.
    ï£§Where’d they take him?
    Khoi shrugs – I was a boy. Past is past. Nobody here thinks about Khmer Rouge anymore, just the future. People want good things, and good things come from China. You look at something and if it say ‘Made in China’ it’s much better than ‘Made in Cambodia.’ Look at your iPod. It says ‘Made in China.’ Sure!
    ï£§But people died.
    ï£§Sure! That’s a life, people die! But now I work to save money for school. I meet tourists and if they want to go to cock-fighting or shooting range, I take them. If they want a bus ticket to Siem Reap or Sihanoukville, I buy for them. But for some reason they always ask about Khmer Rouge. I think – My God! We have Angkor Wat in this country! Why not ask about that!
    Year Zero. Emptied streets of the capital, laundry on lines strung between deserted apartments. Glorious restart of civilization: The city dwellers marched along the highways out into the countryside, hospital beds poured out, newspapers careening down the abandoned sidewalks with no traffic to stop them like birds with propaganda wings. A forced evacuation, all of Phnom Penh empty as marrowless bone.
    ï£§A girl knocked on my door this morning.
    Shlomi picks up the binoculars and peers out across the lake at the boys in the canoe.
    ï£§Ten minutes, she said. She had her hand up my shorts and Christ, I had to shove her out. Six-thirty in the morning. For some reason, I thought she was being chased.
    ï£§That was a dream?
    ï£§No, very real.
    ï£§Every day, for hours and hours. What do they do when the rain comes?
    Piat’s motorcycle growls beneath us and pulls out into the alleyway leading from the guesthouse. I want to get lost in this city with its corners of orange carts, soldier-guarded bank machines, hundreds of parked motorcycles lined up outside the