Though greatly encouraged by Dern’s reports, and friendly with his fellow deserters, Dickie’s suspicions failed to vanish to the point where, with a smooth conscience, he could rejoin the operation. Snug in his hut, he enjoyed the rhythms of village life, especially when the circus folk were in town. Moreover, he had established a modestly successful business of his own.
Up in the Hmong village, a woman had developed a severe crush on our Dickie. She was a middle-aged widow, who, in addition to losing her husband, had suffered such dental shortfall as to be seriously in the path of oral bankruptcy. The widow was as impoverished in the area of both central and lateral incisors as the object of her affection was reputed to be overprivileged in the area of the primary masculine faculty. Some, in fact, claimed that it was after coming upon Dickie bathing in a stream that she, galvanized by the priapic splendor, became enamored of him, but that story likely grew out of Stubblefield’s teasing and cannot be trusted. At any rate, though Dickie was nothing if not egalitarian, the attraction was by no means mutual, and he politely spurned her advances. One day, while in the thrall of infatuation, she presented the American with a handful of small, rough rubies.
It would have been bad manners to refuse a gift, so Dickie accepted the stones and employing sand as an abrasive, cleaned them up to the best of his ability. He then sent them to Thailand aboard Smarty Pants II, whereupon they were purchased by the smugglers for considerably less than they were worth. Dickie gave 50 percent of the proceeds to his admirer, which, of course, only increased her ardor. He encouraged the widow to bring him additional stones, which she did as fast as she could dig them out of the dry riverbeds, mountain washes, and gullies. That was not at all fast, but it proved adequate.
Most of the rubies she unearthed were of the more common yellowish red variety, although about once every three or four years she’d luck upon one of the highly valued deep bluish red gems known as “pigeon blood.” Such rubies, along with all larger specimens, were usually reserved for village elders, but Dickie persuaded the woman to sell them to him. It was rumored that she did so in return for the favor of being allowed to perform fellatio on him, an act for which, due to her lack of interfering nibs, she may have possessed uncommon talent—but the reader should be warned that that story, too, is very probably apocryphal.
When he could at last afford it, Dickie purchased a hand-cranked lapidary. Thereafter, the rubies in his inventory were more presentable. This paid off handsomely when the time came when he would send the gems to Manila with Dern (aka the good Father Gorodish), and Dickie might have become nearly as affluent as the occupants of Villa Incognito had not he shared his profits with the needy citizens of Fan Nan Nan. Thanks to the lanky American, no village in the Lao mountains had such a sufficiency of medical or school supplies. This was kept quiet, for who could guess what the bureaucrats in Vientiane would make of it?
When we think of a ruby, we may think of the sinister apple plugging the umbilical cavity of some greasy pagan idol; we may think of the fiery rays shooting from the eyes of an ornamental dragon; we may think of the jewel that put Burma on the map (never dreaming that Laos’s guilty neighbor would one day change its name to Myanmar in an attempt to hide its shame: Myanmar is Burma incognito), or we may, if we are connoisseurs, think of fat drops of pigeon blood. Ordinarily, however, we would not think of aluminum, which, when excited by a lewd trace of chromium oxide, is what a ruby is; nor do we think rubies to be more highly prized in the marketplace than diamonds, which, in fact, they are. Had his gems been larger and of better quality, and had he received a fairer price, Dickie would have been wealthy indeed. As it was, he did okay for a Goldwire without a Ford dealership to call his own.
Ruby money or no ruby money, the contrast between Dickie’s hut and Villa Incognito only increased as the years went by.
The big, French Colonial-style house had been built as a summer retreat by an official close to the royal family. At the time of its construction, circa 1950, there was a narrow dirt road leading up to the site on the opposite side of the ridge from the gorge, making it accessible by buffalo cart if not motor vehicle. Scarcely a dozen years passed, however, before a mammoth landslide obliterated the road and sheared off the ridge side, rendering access to the house virtually impossible. A few hardy scavengers did labor their way up the precipice to loot the contents of the building, but once it was emptied, it was left to rot.
Actually, it rotted very little. Preserved, perhaps, by the dry mountain air, its structure and foundation remained quite sound. Indoors, the primary task facing Stubblefield and Foley was to chase out the bamboo rats and kill all the spiders and snakes. Dern, conditioned, no doubt, by his fascination with animism, felt uneasy about this carnage, but the Lao helpers, closet Buddhists every one, slew left and right without a qualm. Once the house had been depopulated, Dern and a bevy of the finest local carpenters set about restoring the teak wainscoting and refinishing the mahogany floors. Stubblefield supervised from a big leather chair, the first of many luxurious items with which he would, over time, fill the villa.
Was it really a villa? Yes, even by European standards it would probably qualify. Hardly had he stepped out of the helicopter than Stubblefield christened the place Villa Incognito. Then, he changed his mind. “Villa,” he said, “is a feminine noun, whereas incognito is a masculine modifier. I must apologize for the clumsy error in gender agreement.” Upon his venerable Latin steed, Dern rode to the rescue. Were Stubblefield speaking one of the Romance languages, he said, it might well have verged on a linguistic faux pas, but since both villa and incognito had long since been incorporated into English, and since English had never burdened itself with gender endings, Dern decreed the name grammatically immaculate. Thus, Villa Incognito it was.
By the 1990s, the villa, despite its isolation, was a bit of a cultural hive, the countless hours that Stubblefield spent with his books and Dern with his tools (the aging whirlybird was in almost constant need of repair) in serene contrast to the giggling, jabbering, and sexual wailing of the concubines; the flitting about of housekeepers as they beat carpets and dusted champagne bottles, cigar humidors, and objets d’art; not to mention the aromatic bustle in the kitchen, where lemongrass, turmeric, tamarind, coconut chunks, and coriander leaves were being ceaselessly pounded with mortar and pestle, and shallots, hot chilies, ginger, mint, mangoes, and garlic cloves endlessly diced and chopped. They ate well at Villa Incognito. They fucked well. They strived to improve their minds. With time out to whip up a little virtual morphine for purposes of income, they lived like funky potentates in the former Land of a Million Elephants.
This is not to say that they gave nothing back to the adjacent community. Aside from hiring cooks, housekeepers, and carpenters from the area and paying them decent wages, aside from selecting a number of local beauties to live in luxury as their extralegal wives, they occasionally made monetary donations to the village coffers, although not nearly in the amounts given by the less advantaged Dickie. The villa’s major contribution to Fan Nan Nan may have been Stubblefield’s pedagogy. He forced half the villagers to become fluent in English, improved their rudimentary French, instructed them lightly in history, astronomy, geography, quantum physics, and the literary arts, and exhaustively in philosophy (largely his own), inspiring in the process an appreciation among them both for learning and for that bullshit that the gods are purported to find so redeemably entertaining.
It was in his capacity as a teacher that he got to know Lisa Ko.
Amidst the picturesque confusion that resulted when the National Circus of Laos unexpectedly reassembled itself in remote little Fan Nan Nan, it is surprising that a four-year-old child would attract any notice. Young Ko Ko, nevertheless, was frequently exclaimed over by those who glimpsed her among the jugglers, acrobats, and clowns. Despite almost imperceptibly pointed ears and a nose that lopped slightly to the side, she was remarkably pretty, albeit in the Japanese mode, about which many Lao (frankly, not among the planet
’s most handsome inhabitants) were inclined to be envious or snide. She carried herself with an uncommon dignity, though less like a princess destined to inherit a throne—there was nothing haughty or spoiled about her—than like a kind of rare animal, unaccustomed to the neurotic vagaries of men. She possessed an animal’s self-containment and an animal’s wary grace. There was always something furtive about her, and always just a bit of a faraway look in her shiny black eyes, giving the impression of a connection to distant elements she did not or could not understand.
On the other hand, she seemed grounded, present in the moment, and wise beyond her years, though one could never quite put one’s finger on why she gave that impression. She seldom spoke, but just when an observer thought her as solemn as an idiot savant, she would erupt in such unguardedly sweet and silly laughter that others had to laugh along with her. Dickie had been delighted by her from the start. Stubblefield noticed her for the first time on the day when the cable was strung across the gorge.
Of all the performers exiled in Fan Nan Nan, the aerialists felt the most out of place. Aware that these daredevils, who thrived on risk and applause, were in need of excitement lest they strike out for Bangkok or return to Vientiane, the ringmaster challenged them to string a wire over the misty chasm and walk it if they dared. “Karl Wallenda would do it in an instant,” he said, “Philippe Petit before breakfast and twice on Friday.” After a week of hesitation and debate, during which they sat every day on the canyon’s terrible lip, they announced that this feat, unprecedented in the history of Southeast Asia, was the feat they were born to perform.
Led by the Phom Troupe, the equilibrists hammered together a sturdy platform on the village side of the gorge. To a piling at the center of the platform, they fastened with metal clamps a rope of clear, clean, ungreased steel, composed of eight compressed strands, each seventeen millimeters in diameter, around a core of hemp. At the tip of the other end of the cable, they made a spliced loop with a thimble inside it. They hooked a heavy-duty turnbuckle to the loop, then had it and the attached cable flown across the chasm in Smarty Pants II. On the villa side, they built an identical platform, and with the aid of the turnbuckle and a pulley block, stretched the cable tight and secured it to a second post. Limited by the steep sides of the gorge, they steadied the cable to the extent they could manage with a tripod of guy wires on either side. This paucity of guys meant that the cable would have some slack toward its middle, a condition that heightened the challenge—and greatly stimulated the aerialists by making their sphincters wrinkle and their pulses race.
Everyone, circus folk and natives alike, gathered for the first walk on the wire. That honor fell to Papa Phom, the seventy-year-old patriarch of Lao wire-walkers. It was nearly dusk when, in baby-blue tights and a silk jacket adorned with silver stars, the elder Phom climbed onto the platform, offered prayers to the four winds, and slowly placed his balancing foot, shod in a light blue slipper, onto the cable. His leg fixed, he stood that way for several minutes, as if feeling the music of the wire in his body. Then, gripping the balancing pole that is essential for any crossing of that length, he arched his back and with small, regimented but graceful steps moved forward. The villagers started to applaud. The circus people hushed them.
Halfway across the gorge, at the point where the wire commenced to sag, Papa Phom stopped, carefully turned around, bowed deeply, and saluted the crowd. Everybody smiled. He turned again and resumed his crossing. At that moment, Ko Ko began to weep. The child was quite agitated, and since no one else attempted to comfort her, Stubblefield picked her up. He was in the process of slipping a piece of nutmeg candy into her small, quivering mouth when there was a gasp from the throng. Papa Phom was teetering. Some thought it was just part of the act, a trick to scare and thrill the audience, but the wire-walkers recognized trouble.
A gust of wind? A heart attack or stroke? A bat that flitted too close to his head? A summons from the dead bride at the bottom of the abyss? Nobody would ever know. But they all watched in horror as the old man’s legs splayed, one foot lost the wire, then the second, and, never letting go of his pole (as no professional ever would), he capsized. Down, down, down he fell in the twilight, his celestial jacket billowing like a sail; down, down until he vanished in the toothless mist that rose to swallow him; down, down until he flattened, as he must have, the bride’s lonely ghost.
In the night of grief that followed, many thoughts were expressed, two of which may bear repeating. “He died as he lived,” observed his sister, “doing that thing that made him most come alive. No man can ask for more than that.” The other thought was spoken as an unusually pale sun, maybe a tad ashamed of its cheerfulness, peeked over the ridge. “The wire-walker who does not walk today will never truly walk a wire again.”
Scarcely had the dew evaporated from the wild chrysanthemum petals than the equilibrists were lining up at the platform, each one clad not in practice duds but in his or her most colorful hippodrome finery.
Out of respect, the Phom Troupe was ushered to the head of the line. Papa Phom’s eldest son had the honor. Wearing his father’s spare jacket, the one whose sleeves were a little frayed and whose stars had lost their luster, he took up his pole and set his balancing foot firmly on the cable, letting his toes listen until they had memorized every note, every nuance of tempo, in the wire’s hard, ethereal hum. He thanked the winds from four directions, including a special prayer to the God of Sudden Gusts, and began to glide along the wire as if he were on ice. That glide was his personal style, and it seemed to serve him well.
As the walker approached midpoint, where the wire was disposed to sag, Stubblefield kept a watchful eye on the small girl, Ko Ko. She remained calm, composed, almost hypnotized. When the son at last reached the opposite platform, she quietly nodded her approval. As for Stubblefield and everyone else, they released such a huge, collective sigh that had it occurred a minute earlier, it surely would have blown the man off the strand.
Next, it was the mother’s turn. Old Madame Phom, so freshly widowed, allowed her red eyes to take in the full length of the cable. Then she set out in short, mincing steps like a geisha with a full pot of tea. However, at the precise spot where her husband had turned, bowed, and saluted the crowd, she did the very same thing, adding as a flourish, a drop to one knee. No longer able to contain themselves, the onlookers cheered. And the other aerialists began to jostle one another in their eagerness to pit their balance and breath against that thin thread that would stand between them and the vertiginous void.
Once Madame was safely across, the rest of the Phoms, the siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins, each walked. Papa’s seven-year-old granddaughter, Lisa Ko’s lifelong playmate, cried and stamped her slippers because she was refused a turn. Then, all five members of the Anou Family (only two of whom were actually related) walked the wire. After that came the Paris-trained trio that billed itself as the Flying Yellow Devils. They crossed together, three on the cable at once, egging one another on. Finally, it was the Grand Kai’s turn. Kai, whose name in Lao means chicken, wore greasepaint, a pointy hat, and baggy plaid trousers. Pru Foley might have loved him, especially when, midwire, he dropped his pants and treated the cheering crowd to a spectacularly sunlit view of his naked derrière.
In the months that followed, there was seldom a calm, dry day when there were no walkers on the cable. In addition to the sheer phenomenon of it, Stubblefield appreciated the wire for the auxiliary, though obviously restricted, route it provided to and from the villa: Smarty Pants II was destined to become increasingly unreliable, and fuel needed to be conserved for business trips into Thailand. The wire would serve as a passageway only when absolutely necessary, but it was satisfying to have it as an option. Incidentally, the first American to submit to being pushed across it in a wheelbarrow was Dern Foley, the quintessential aviator, a lover of heights. There were counterweights hanging from the wheelbarrow to insure its stability (and to free the pusher from the need to carry a pole), b
ut it was still a daring proposition, and Dern’s adrenal glands took full advantage of it.
The MIAs’ concern that news of the high-wire performances would attract rubberneckers to the gorge was short-lived. The circus, being itself on the lam, paid a couple of Fan Nan Nan’s toughest men to station themselves a full kilometer down the only path leading to the village, and curious strangers were summarily turned away. And since the Hmong, too, had reason to avoid publicity, there was nothing to fear from farther up the mountain. Everyone was rather in hiding and no one seemed terribly to mind.
There is no activity in the cosmos more unvarying, more predictable than the rate at which uranium turns into lead. That’s a good thing. If the universal clock was based on the rate at which novelty turns into routine, we might never show up at the dentist on time. Yet, sooner or later, however capriciously and imprecisely, the “oh wow” does decay into the “ho-hum,” so it isn’t surprising that before a year had passed, a man or woman merely walking a treacherous wire hundreds of feet above an abysmal gorge failed to divert Fan Nannies from their everyday chores. Moreover, since the circus equilibrists could just as easily practice their acts on a cable strung between tree trunks, three feet off the ground, there was no logical reason to brave the height, the vapors, or the gusts. And yet some did.