Slash and Burn

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. He’d seen men die in all kinds of ways. He knew what St. Peter’s first question would be.
    “How did you go down, son? Were you calm about it? We don’t want no screaming girl scouts up here, boy.”
    So Boyd opted for cool. When you’re cool, death doesn’t 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 he’d 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. She’d 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.

1
    ANOTHER FINE MESS
    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. They’d 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 you’ve gotten us into, Dr. Siri.”
    “Me? I didn’t do it.”
    “No. Not it exactly. It you didn’t do, I grant you. But the consequences that led to it . They’ve got your fingerprints all over them.”
    “Madam, judging from the evidence in front of us, I’d say this would have occurred whether we were here or not. And it didn’t even have to have happened here. This was a tragedy begging to be let out of the bag.”
    “Again, you’re right. But if you hadn’t volunteered yourself, volunteered us all, we’d be at home now beside the Mekhong eating noodles in relative peace. We wouldn’t be in this room with this particular body, about to be embroiled in an international scandal. This would be someone else’s 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. Everything’s perfectly safe, you say. And look at us now. Five weeks ago we were perfectly content and now we’re 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, wasn’t 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 country’s 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 who’d nationalized all the old royalist estates in preparation for this great socialist plan.
    If the weather wasn’t bad enough, the country’s close proximity to Kampuchea, once a cultural and commercial partnership, had become a liability. Refugees fleeing the Khmer