The Merry Misogynist

thin mat that covered the bamboo floor. His jacket was on a hook. Thirty-six degrees Celsius, hot as hell, but he always gave them a jacket show. They’d remember the jacket long after he’d taken it off and rolled up his sleeves. There might be a camera. Someone probably took the bus to the town and used the money they’d all saved up to buy film to record the happy event. It was no problem. He’d insist on taking a picture of the guests. While they were lining up he’d briefly flip open the back of the camera and let in the light just long enough to leave them with twenty-four exposures of snow. Not a shred of actual evidence that he ever existed .
    He waved the banana-leaf fan in front of his face. What a place. They lived beside a main road and didn’t even have electricity. How could anybody exist like this? How awful it was that somebody as special as he was had to mix with such people. So much had gone wrong already that day. He needed some good fortune. Never mind. A few more hours and he’d be driving back along that road to the honeymoon supper. Before midnight, he’d have his sex and be whole again. Not so long now. Not so long .
 
    The sun’s glare filled up the windscreen. The dust-jacketed jeep pulled into the clearing that marked the end of the track. There were a few unloved houses around its rim. It had the mood of a village that had seen bigger and brighter days. The clearing had two crude soccer posts at either end, but Phosy knew that the labour invested in preparing that land hadn’t merely been to give the children somewhere to play. He’d seen its like before.
    “I wonder how many helicopter drops this place saw in its heyday,” Madame Daeng said to nobody in particular.
    Phosy parked on the halfway line, and they all climbed from the jeep, slowly unknotting their joints. They carried a different type of tension with them also. They’d begun to feel it when the odometre announced they were two kilometres from their destination. They all knew what it was. There’s a gland somewhere in the human body whose sole purpose is to allow pessimism an outlet. It is particularly active when you’re on the doorstep of danger, when you know a homicidal maniac is somewhere ahead of you, one who is capable of unthinkable acts of cruelty. Real-life evil couldn’t begin to match the horrors the pessimism gland secreted.
    Nobody was in a rush to come and greet the new arrivals.
    “Anybody else not see what I don’t see?” asked Daeng.
    “We’re missing a truck,” said Phosy.
    “We didn’t see it on our way up,” Daeng agreed. “So, unless there’s another way out of here, and I don’t see that either, the truck had to leave over three hours ago.”
    Phosy thought about it. “We’ve come from the two other collection points and nothing passed us going in the opposite direction. The only way it could have gone was north at the Ban Nahoi intersection, away from the census bases.”
    “That is a very bad sign,” Daeng decided.
    “And where the hell is everybody from this place?”
    “Twelve o’clock,” said Daeng, pointing north. The policemen turned to see a bedraggled couple in their fifties coming toward them. Given the ghost-town feel of the surroundings, they could easily have been the curators of a haunted historical site. They had all the attributes.
    “Good health,” the man said, although he obviously hadn’t been blessed with it. He was pitted with childhood smallpox scars and had a yellowish sheen to his skin. His anorexic wife made him look like a paragon of health by comparison.
    “Good health,” said Phosy, reluctantly shaking the man’s hand. “We were hoping to see Comrade Buaphan.”
    “He left,” said the host.
    Phosy thought, ‘damn’ but said, “When?”
    “Around midday. Went off in the truck. Left me in a pickle, he did. We’ve had census collection volunteers coming down from the hills all afternoon to hand in their papers and get their fees. I didn’t know what to tell them.”
    “Did he do anything like that the last time he was here?” Phosy asked.
    “He did take the truck a few times, but he was usually back in time to talk to the collectors.”
    “Where does he sleep when he’s here?”
    “Up there,” said the man, pointing to a solitary hut on a hill. “We told him he could stay with us in the main house but he preferred it up there by himself.”
    “How many of you live up here?” Daeng asked. Phosy didn’t bother to