Within weeks of that inconclusive but inferential conversation, during which time the airmen continued to enjoy the hospitality of Fan Nan Nan and to follow their nebulous pursuits, the Hanoi-backed Pathet Lao had seized control of most of Laos. On August 23, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (the merchants of Marxism employ the term “people’s” with a veracity every bit as sincere as “vine ripe” and “farm fresh”), declared itself the ruling party of the newly formed Lao People’s Democratic Republic. A policy of “accelerated socialism” was embarked upon, and among other vine-ripened reforms, the people’s practice of Buddhism was severely curtailed.
Now presumably, the new Communist government would have been obliged to turn over the American airmen to the International Red Cross for repatriation, but the hard-liners were drunk with victory and vengeance, and should the Smarty Pantsers, undocumented as they were, be discovered or give themselves up, there was a definite chance they’d be shot as spies. Of course, if they were shrewd and careful and lucky, they might sneak across the Mekong into Thailand, where—glory hallelujah!—they’d be debriefed by U.S. agents for days on end and then paraded down Main Street America as heroes of a war everybody would have preferred to forget. “If they brought us to the Rose Garden to pin medals on us,” Stubblefield suggested, “we could suddenly jump on the President and bite off his ears”—but they never followed up on the idea.
No further meetings were called. In fact, they never had another conversation—not one—about whether they ought or ought not to head home. Sentimentalists might say they were home, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Cynics might deride them for wallowing in the romance of exile, but it wasn’t that simple, either. The door to novelty is always slightly ajar: many pass it by with barely a glance, some peek inside but choose not to enter, others dash in and dash out again; while a few, drawn by curiosity, boredom, rebellion, or circumstance, venture in so deep or wander around in there so long that they can never find their way back out.
By October of ’75, the time for talk of homecoming—of bright futures, mature aspirations, and the ties that bind—apparently had passed. By then, Dern and Stubblefield had gone into business in Fan Nan Nan. Dickie had acquired a handful of rubies and a cheesy guitar. And the circus had come to town.
In Vientiane, Lisa Ko checked into the Novotel Belvedere, the most expensive hotel in the capital but one from which she knew she stood a chance of making a trouble-free international call. Even before washing off the dust of the road, she rang up the circus production office in Tampa, Florida, and got Abe Altman on the line. Abe was the talent scout who’d “discovered” the beautiful trainer of unusual animals, then twenty-nine, in Singapore the previous year, and who functioned as her North American manager.
“Herro. This Madame Ko.”
“Madame Ko,” acknowledged Abe. “Where are you? They’ve been concerned about you.”
“In Vientiane. In Laos. I come U.S. tomorrow.”
“Is everything okay over there? Your family’s okay?”
“Everything okay. So sorry they concern. I come back tomorrow. Show now is in Porkland?”
“Portland. Yeah. But tomorrow they’re moving to Seattle.”
“I come Seattle.”
“Okay.” Abe hesitated. “Of course, your . . . your little animals won’t be there.”
“What? What you say?”
“Damn. I guess you haven’t heard. Your, uh, your natookies . . .”
“Tanukis!” She almost shouted it.
“Tanukis. They’re gone. All of ’em. The train derailed between Frisco and Portland. That clown, that Bardo Boppie-Bip, I guess she was supposed to be looking after ’em . . .”
“What she do?!” Lisa demanded.
“Well, what I heard is that she was drunk and didn’t lock ’em up properly, and when the car derailed, the door flew open and they escaped. They took off up in the hills and nobody could round ’em up. Tried everything. Show hired professional trackers even. Hell, they went in there with dogs, but the only two tanukis they flushed, well, the tanukis led the hounds into a river or a pond or something and then turned on ’em and drowned ’em. Drowned both hounds right there.”
Picturing this, Lisa couldn’t help but smile—but the smile quickly faded. “They . . . they no find?”
“No. They’ve pretty much quit trying. They’re hoping that when you get back you can maybe go in there and recapture the things. But it’s all thick woods, you know. And I guess the tanukis have spread out. Trackers say they hear ’em making weird noises from all different parts of the mountains.”
Lisa moaned. “I come tomorrow,” she said softly.
“Good, honey. But I have to tell you, even if you do round up your pets, your act is probably done for this year. We’ll see what the future holds. You got a pretty popular schtick. That damn clown, they’re letting her finish out the season, and then I’ll bet it’s back to the oddball channel for her and her red nose. Circuses don’t tolerate boozers like they used to. Well, good luck, Madame Ko. Have a safe flight.”
After hanging up, Lisa sat on the bed for a while. Then she drew a hot bath and slumped in the perfumed water up to her small but perfectly sculpted breasts. She pinned up her hair, but as she relaxed, it got wet anyway.
Outside, beyond the open shutters, a monsoon wind played the palm fronds as if they were musical saws. Somewhere below the window, cicadas were holding a political rally, Morse-coding their single slogan—Live and let live!—over and over to the four indifferent directions. A flesh-colored moon, as ripe as any “vine ripe” tomato, was skinny-dipping in a lake of its own light. Leaning back, Lisa watched it slowly swim out of sight, languid, naked, and unashamed. The occasional stars were like inflamed eyeballs, spying on the swimmer—and the bather—through peepholes in an anthracite curtain. Due to the lateness of the hour, the city’s acrid charcoal cookfires had long since cooled, and as it lumbered through the bathroom window now, the air sagged under the weight of the sweetness it carried: jasmine, lemongrass, sandalwood, frangipani, and olfactory reminders of the afternoon’s explosive rain.
The sounds, aromas, and colors of the natural world calmed her heart in a way the bath could not. As she gave herself over to them, they made her feel as though she were some sort of creature. She made faint, unconscious creature noises as she toweled off the tubwater. Her movements were as fluid as the tail of a beast.
Dry, Lisa draped the damp white towel over the television set. From her bag she produced a tattered square of silk—a scrap from an antique kimono—and centered it on top of the towel. To the left of the square, she placed a tiny folded-paper figurine, not a buddha exactly but close enough. On the right, she laid the ruby ring that Dickie had had made for her to signal their nuptial intentions. She searched for something suitable to complete the arrangement, thinking how a fresh chrysanthemum would have been perfect, it would have matched the one embroidered on the silk, but, of course, Vientiane was too tropical for ’mums. Finally, she settled on one of her black patent-leather boots, the shiny bad-ass show boots she wore when she performed. “Isn’t that what I am in this life: a performer?” Then she smiled. “Isn’t everyone?”
She stood the boot atop the square. And, still naked, she knelt in front of the makeshift shrine.
At first the words were slow in forming. “Mother.” A long pause. “Mother? Mother, I need your guidance. Grandmother Kazu, I call on you, as well. Help me, please. Great-grandmother Miho, you gave us our character, our direction, our knowledge, if it can be considered knowledge; you bound us to something outside the realm of normal expectations, and although my earthly connection to you has been limited to this scrap of old kimono, I feel entitled to call on you, to beg for your light upon my path. Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, please visit me tonight. In my dream mind, a door will be left open for you. I will leave tea on this foolish shrine here, or sake if you prefer. I am your daughter, youngest of your line. I need you. I need you. Please. Please c
ome.”
Did Miho or Kazu or Lisa’s mother, O-Ko, contact her in her sleep that night? Maybe, maybe not. She couldn’t quite get a handle on it. The clock radio blared on at 5:00 A.M. (preset: she had an early flight), jarring her into wakefulness so abruptly, so violently (it was a news broadcast and the U.S. President was ineptly biting sound) that any dream she might have hosted, any memory of dreaming, was crushed instantly to dust. There seemed to be a shadowy residue right behind her eyes, a trace of ectoplasm on the pillowcase, yet try as she might she could reconstruct nothing.
Knock! Knock!
“Who’s there?”
No answer. If, indeed, there had been any knocking at all.
At that moment, however, she unthinkingly touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth—and a walloping jolt shot through her. She gasped. She sat partway up in bed.
The thing had doubled in size. More than doubled. Small still, but growing. Swelling, actually. Quivering, too. Roundish. Hard yet spongy. Hot to the tongue. Moist to the finger. One could imagine the prostate of Lawrence of Arabia. A radioactive gooseberry. Frida Kahlo’s clitoris. Or maybe not. Maybe just a cyst or a boil. Yet, its throb was anything but pathological. It was not the red throb of affliction but the blue throb of conception, the blue pulse of fate.
“It’s happening,” Lisa Ko whispered. “Isn’t it? It’s starting to happen now. It’s happening to me.”
PART IV
The true believer can believe in a political system, in a religious doctrine, or in some social movement that combines elements of the two, but the true believer cannot truly believe in life.
A true believer may worship Jehovah, Allah, or Brahma, the supernatural beings who allegedly created all life; a true believer may slavishly adhere to a dogma designed theoretically to improve life; yet for life itself—its pleasures, wonders, and delights—he or she holds minimal regard.
Music, chess, wine, card games, attractive clothing, dancing, meditation, kites, perfume, marijuana, flirting, soccer, cheeseburgers, any expression of beauty, and any recognition of genius or individual excellence: each of those things has been severely condemned and even outlawed by one cadre of true believers or another in modern times. Thus, it should come as no surprise that when the communists seized control of Laos in 1975, they shut down the National Circus in Vientiane. A circus was a frivolous distraction from the serious business of socialist reform, was it not?
Immediately following the closing, the managing director of the circus (he also functioned as what in America would be called a ringmaster) assembled all performers. “Our brave young commissars, in their excitement and patriotic zeal, have neglected to take into account that this very arena was built with Soviet money or that it was modeled after the renowned Moscow Circus. From the European example, we know that circuses have never been considered at odds with the aspirations of the Marxist state. Sooner or later, our brave young commissars will be made aware of their error, and the National Circus of Laos will be revived. In the meantime, however, our brave young commissars are in a bit of a frenzy and tend to be somewhat indiscriminate in their hunt for deviants to imprison or shoot dead. It is best that we go into hiding.”
Suddenly, everyone was talking at once, but the ringmaster shushed them. “Since a day will come when our abilities will be considered not only nonthreatening to the revolution but excellent for the people’s morale, we need to stay prepared. We need to hide together so that we can rehearse and practice together.”
The ringmaster knew just the place. He had been born in Fan Nan Nan and lived there until the age of fourteen when his parents (secretly Lao Lum, of course) sent him to live with a family friend in Vientiane so that he might get a formal education. Thus, under his direction, the circus performers—one by one, in pairs, or in small groups—made their way to the isolated village on the rim of the gorge, where they reassembled as an invisible circus, giving name (shhh!) to La Vallée du Cirque.
Because of its French and Russian influences, the National Circus of Laos was somewhat more varied than the circuses of China and Japan, which have always consisted almost exclusively of acrobats, tumblers, and jugglers. Still, it had very few animal acts, so except for the problem of concealing costumes and rigging, the moving piecemeal to Fan Nan Nan, once the elephants had been appropriated by a nationalized logging operation, was not extremely difficult. Among the showfolk who turned up in the village was a four-year-old girl named Ko Ko.
At that tender age, Ko Ko’s sole “job” with the circus had consisted of donning an ersatz Wild West cowgirl costume and sitting amidst the antlers of a stag, while its trainer provoked it into galloping around the ring. The stag, tough as its steaks must have been, was eaten by hungry revolutionaries and never made it to Fan Nan Nan. Little Ko Ko was carried there by her foster parents. Her biological mother, a gaminelike tumbler called O-Ko, had abandoned her only a year after her birth.
Perhaps “abandoned” is too strong a word. O-Ko had suckled her baby daughter almost to the time of her departure, caring for her with obvious devotion. Then, she’d deliberately left her in the care of the most tenderhearted couple in the circus. (O-Ko had slept with any number of showmen, but none was ever identified as the father.) There was a note with a few instructions and many expressions of love and regret, but absolutely no explanation of why she, O-Ko, had taken it upon herself to simply walk off into the forest one night and never reappear. Some blamed it on her Japanese ancestry. And most seemed content to believe that eventually everything would be explained in the other note that O-Ko had left behind: the sealed one that was supposed to be opened by Ko Ko on the day of her first menstruation.
There was one other thing. Baby Ko Ko had a sore bump in the roof of her mouth. Under no conditions, O-Ko instructed, was it to be incised, compressed, or medicated in any way. “Leave it alone,” the fleeing mother wrote. “It will be fine, I promise you. Someday my daughter will understand.”
As the fugitive circus was settling into Fan Nan Nan, our MIAs were in the process of weighing an opportunity that would enable them to more comfortably remain missing—if to remain missing was their intent, and in retrospect it appears that, subconsciously at least, it was. In his effort to fully comprehend animism, Dern, ever the religious scholar, had paid an up-mountain visit to the area’s largest Hmong settlement. Stubblefield, who, with no library at hand, was waxing restless; and Dickie, who, though he’d taken to Lao village life like a duct to tape, was always eager for new experiences, went along for the climb. What they found up there that day served to further deepen the trough of novelty into which they’d descended.
In comparatively gentle Laos, Hmong tribesmen are considered aggressive and warlike by nature. When the CIA went looking for resistance fighters to help guard the right-wing royal government against leftist insurgents, the Hmong were ideal candidates. U.S. spooks covertly armed them, trained them, bribed them, conned them, and sent them out to fight and die for America’s “national interests.” Their efforts failed, the red revolution succeeded. By late 1975, Hmong refugees were pouring into Thailand by the thousands, seeking haven there or petitioning for free passage to California. While the vast majority of Hmong had neither served as U.S. mercenaries nor actively supported them, they all shared in the stigma, and it was fear of reprisals that sparked the mass exodus. Those Hmong who remained in Laos were obliged to keep a low profile, the result being that they were afraid to take their opium crop (’75 was a banner year for poppies) to market.
When our American airmen—pretending to be representatives of a United Nations relief organization—saw that dusty grainery crammed with teddy-bear-colored dream paste, they began to entertain romantic and dangerous ideas.
Those ideas grew larger, more lurid, after they shared a few pipes with the local gentry. (Ahhh. “The smoke of paradise,” opium has been called, although, technically, opium produces chemical vapors rather than smoke: it bubbles and melts when heated but does not actually burn.) And the ideas
ballooned and sprouted crazy legs when the hosts threw aside a pile of grass mats at the far end of the hamlet to reveal an intact if immobilized helicopter.
Soviet-built, the small chopper had belonged to the Pathet Lao’s elite troops. Sometime in 1972, it had run out of fuel—the Lao were careless with machinery—and made an emergency landing on a ledge just below the village. The Hmong wasted no time in killing all aboard. Then they spent grunting weeks with ropes and skid planks, muscling the craft up to the chief’s personal poppy patch, where, camouflaged, it had sat ever since. Dern Foley’s pupils, already dilated, commenced to resemble something at the end of Stephen Hawking’s telescope.
A deal was struck. Dern moved in with the Hmong. Eventually, he managed to get the whirlybird whirling. Fuel was obtained. He took the chief and two of the prettiest girls in town up for a spin. There was a celebration. More fuel was soon procured from black marketeers down-mountain. The helicopter was loaded with bricks and loaves of the sweet-smelling caramel God dough. “You’re a lord now, Foley,” Stubblefield proclaimed, as his friend got behind the controls. “Guardian of the loaves.”
Only Dickie Goldwire felt a sick maggoty squirm in his innards when the chopper lifted off for Thailand.
At the Foley bungalow, that year’s Labor Day observance brought about a reversal in roles. Bootsey had the Monday off, the post office being closed for the holiday, while Pru, so long unemployed, was beginning her temporary job with the circus: the big show, having just trained into Seattle, was scheduled to commence its week-long run on Wednesday.
“There’s something so . . . so manly about Labor Day,” said Bootsey. “It’s cute.”
In the midst of slipping into a pair of baggy polyester slacks, Pru paused and snorted. “Explain this to me then,” she demanded. “If Labor Day is a day set aside to honor the working stiff, you know, to honor honest toil, why then do people celebrate it by staying home and goofing off? I mean, if work is so noble and good for us, wouldn’t you think we’d choose to honor it by working twice as long and hard on its special day?”