Colin Cotterill - Slash and Burn

You know? Being shut up in a cage with a live bear was a piece of cake compared to being drunk and high in charge of half-a-million dollars worth of flying metal. The full moon beckoned, hanging there like an ivory wok in a vast steel-gray sky. It spread the landscape with an eerie monochrome like daytime to a dog. Medium-gray jungle against dark-gray mountains. Patches of charcoal and slivers of silver off the rivers. Boyd could make out every leaf, every rock, as clear as creation day. He was a god. Oh, yeah. A deity on a mission. The almighty protagonist in the movies they made before they could afford colour: starring Boyd Bowry in his never-ending quest for cheese.

Cheese, little buddy, hed told Marcos. Ill bring you back a hunk of moon cheese. They let you scoop it right out. You want fries or something with it?

Man, you shouldnt leave me here with that, was all Marcos could come back with. Boyd remembered being at the door of the cage then. Hed stopped, looked back at the bear: drunk, snoring, farting, head in her feed trough.

Shell be cool, man. Fix her a cup of coffee in the morning. Tell her it was great. Leave your phone number.

Marcos had done one of those non-military salutes. Thats why that fingers so long, you know? Gets all the exercise. That was what? An hour ago? Half an hour? Time lost all its credibility at ten thousand feet with no colour in the world. Someone oughta write a PhD about that. The relationship between between hue and chronology. The colour of minutes. Hed heard Marcos yelling some Filipino double Dutch at him as he walked away. The little guy was mad. Smiled a lot, but.

No, wait. Marcos? Thats not right. Marcos is the goddamned president. The guys about to be eaten by a bear. The least I can do is remember his name. Ive known him for.

OK, dont be distracted now.

Focus.

Cheese.

Ignition and all that instrumental hoo-ha had been instinctive and that was just as well cause he couldnt recall doing any of it. Hed cranked her up, left the ground, and here he was heading off to the heavenly moon deli service. A Sikorsky was a hell of a lot safer than a Chevy in so many respects. Never drove a Sikorsky into a fire hydrant, for one. And if you did, the cops would never catch up with you, for two. And, what else? A Chevy never surfed moon rays like a Sikorsky H34.

Oh, no.

Oh, yeah.

What a trip. What a goddamned trip. Just hanging in the gray, looking at the moon. It was cosmic. What happened to nights like this? What happened to love and harmony, man? No peace and quiet for those monkeys down there in the trees. For those big lizards on the rocks. Sorry guys. At least he didnt have to listen to his own engine growl. He had his headphones connected direct to the cassette player. The Who: Brits, but complex, man. Percussion like the punch of anti-aircraft flak.

And even though the music went straight into his brain and dead-ended there, he got it into his head that the words were being broadcast all over Nam to the east and Thailand in the west and some karmic interpretation service was sending the message to farmers in their bamboo beds. He shouted over the music, You were deceived, brothers, but you can see what weve done, right? Youve got the magic eyes? You know well get ours in some other life. Youve got that damned right. What do we know?

And that was when it happened; the actual date and time when the sky fell on Chicken Little. There was a thump first, then an odd lack of vibration. One second the scenery was holding him up, the next a trapdoor opened in the universe and he fell through it. Gravity. What a concept! The fuel light was flashing like Christmas. There were procedures. He could probably send out a mayday. That was on the list. But who in their right mind would be up at 2:00 A.M. waiting for some dopehead on a magical mystery tour to call in? And timing, man. He was in fourteen thousand pounds of metal heading down to earth with twenty canisters of volatile substance on board. Some rescue that would be. He disengaged the rotors, waited for stability, unclamped his belt and rose from his seat. He smiled at the briefcase sitting in the copilots seat but he didnt have time to take it with him. He had barely thirty seconds of the rest of his life to look forward to. To sort it all out.

Use your time wisely, man.

Who should he think of? Who to pledge his love to? Who to hate? No, that last one was easy. That son-of-a-bitch was one day away from getting his. And now, look at this. Goddamn it. A one-way express ticket to some big old Boyd barbecue. All in the timing.

He worked his way down the crawl space to the cabin and staggered around in there. Hed seen men die in all kinds of ways. He knew what St. Peters first question would be.

How did you go down, son? Were you calm about it? We dont want no screaming girl scouts up here, boy.

So Boyd opted for cool. When youre cool, death doesnt seem that final.

There was a village and all were asleep save two. They saw the chopper come down, not like a rock, not plumb straight, more the way a slab of slate might slice through water. They both saw the wheel hit the tree tops then a spark and the big bird exploded-spewed out a whole galaxy. One of the insomniacs smiled and clapped his hands but he could never tell anyone what hed seen. The other was so shocked she fell out of a tree, hit her head on the way down and knocked herself blind. But the last image that projected itself in her mind was as certain as the earth. Shed seen it. A dragon had collided with the moon. It had burst into a million shards and the pieces cascaded across the jungle and there would never be lightness again at night.

Dr. Siri and Madame Daeng sat on the edge of the smelly bed and looked at the body hanging from the door handle opposite. They were a couple not renowned for silence but this one lent itself most splendidly to speechlessness. They took in the too-red lipstick and the too-tight underwear. They breathed the whiskey fumes and the scent of vomit diluted with disinfectant. Theyd both seen their share of death, perhaps more than a fair share. But neither had experienced anything like this.

Well, said Daeng at last, uncomfortable in the early morning quiet. The foggy mist rolled in through the window and rasped the inside of her throat.

Well, indeed, agreed her husband.

This is another fine mess youve gotten us into, Dr. Siri.

Me? I didnt do it.

No. Not it exactly. It you didnt do, I grant you. But the consequences that led to it. Theyve got your fingerprints all over them.

Madam, judging from the evidence in front of us, Id say this would have occurred whether we were here or not. And it didnt even have to have happened here. This was a tragedy begging to be let out of the bag.

Again, youre right. But if you hadnt volunteered yourself, volunteered us all, wed be at home now beside the Mekhong eating noodles in relative peace. We wouldnt be in this room with this particular body, about to be embroiled in an international scandal. This would be someone elses problem. Someone in good health capable of handling it. But oh no. One last adventure before I retire, you say. What can go wrong? you say. Everythings perfectly safe, you say. And look at us now. Five weeks ago we were perfectly content and now were up to our necks in dung.

Come on, Daeng. Be fair. What could I have done to avoid it?

What could you have done?

Yes.

Torn up the note.

Five Weeks Earlier

It was true, just five weeks before, things had been normal. Well, normal for Vientiane. But first there was the haunting, then the note, then the Americans. And somewhere between the three life had become complicated again. That was Laos in the late seventies though, wasnt it? What can you say? The place had always been mysterious, always been a victim of its politics and its confused beliefs and its weather. While the north ex perienced a premature dry season, the southern provinces were being flooded by Typhoon Joe. Worst hit was Champasak, the show province where almost half the countrys farming cooperatives had been established. All of them had been rained into submission and, once again, the locals were convinced that Lady Kosob, the goddess of the rice harvests, was displeased with government policy. The collectives program was doomed. This came as a blow to the ministry of agriculture whod nationalized all the old royalist estates in preparation for this great socialist plan.