Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

their loved ones. What about their spirits? I know. It doesn’t sound like me, does it? But all that hanging around in temples…well, something has to rub off.
    One annoying phrase that kept replaying in my mind was what the old Chinese lady had said the day I asked her why she’d sold her land. Even after I edited her bad Thai in my mind, it still sounded like a second-rate martial-arts movie line: “People who connect the past and the future may know the present.” I’d thought about heading back over to Ranong and beating the meaning out of her with a baseball bat, but that was on one of our very rare red meat days.
    So, I began with the past. What I knew already was that, before the bridge was built across the neck of the estuary, all the land around here had been underdeveloped. Before the prawn farms there were still mangroves and much of the landscape was still covered in a thick layer of natural vegetation. Huge tracts of land were bought up by local Chinese speculators who waited for the inevitable march of time. There were no paved roads and the only settlements were to be found on the coast. The coconut and palm plantations had yet to arrive. When they did, Old Mel was one of the pioneers and I needed to imagine what the countryside was like when his family moved in.
    The land office was one of a huddle of simple government buildings around the Lang Suan stadium (capacity twelve thousand – mostly standing). The office was another bruised edifice that begged not to be painted white again. Anyone could stroll up to the second floor and take a look at the square-meter plans that sketched out the allotments and their boundaries. The two plots I was searching for were clearly marked with the current borders. I could see how they fitted into the overall land-grab mosaic. If I’d so wished, I could have asked for the names of any of the neighboring owners and been given contact details. The land department did all it could to encourage the sale and resale of its dirt.
    In a back room were large cardboard rolls that contained older and older versions of these plans. By digging deep, I made my way to 1980 where I found the land before its sale by the Chainawats, separated at the original border. There were two interesting differences in the surrounding plots. One was that the parcels were very much larger. The land demons hadn’t yet begun to slice and dice their plots and sell them at extortionate prices. Two was the anomaly that almost all of the land divisions had remained faithful to one long continuous border, as if someone had drawn a random uneven line across the map and told everyone they were to keep to one side of it or the other. I asked the clerk why this was but she was young and more interested in her fingernails. She suggested I take a look at the geological maps of the region.
    My quest led me to Professor Woot Juntasa at the department of geology of Mae Jo University. This was a pretty but minor campus of the mother Mae Jo in Chiang Mai and whenever I’d passed by, it had always seemed to be unoccupied. The day of my visit was no exception. I walked from building to building looking for somebody to guide me to the professor’s study. The first human I found was the portly professor himself. His face was a shiny red mask that hinted at either too much field work in the midday sun or eczema. Either way I got the feeling he would have been happier at a campus in Scandinavia. Even under the full Finnish blast from his air-conditioning, his armpits were still forging through some tropical jungle. His eyebrows were too high on his forehead and it made all his expressions ones of surprise.
    He seemed truly delighted to have something to do of more substance than teaching soil erosion to bored undergraduates. I told him about the region I was interested in and he smiled that knowing smile of an expert. He told me that not only did he have large-scale area maps of the Lang Suan river basin, he also had aerial photographs that I might find amusing. He launched off into a description of the region from the Paleolithic period and we retired to a small meeting room where he spread his maps out across the table.
    “Perhaps you could point out exactly the terrain you’re interested in?” he said.
    It wasn’t so easy without the labeled plot boundaries, but I was able to locate Old Mel’s land from the bend in the river and the relief lines of the Wat Ny Kow cliffs. Professor Woot laid a sheet of