I turned away mid-gawk. No need to give him a big head. Make that a bigger head.
Over our breakfast of bananas and sticky rice, Bounmy giggled at a dramatic story Vang was telling complete with big flourishes and waves of the hand.
“What’s he saying?” I asked, peeling a fourth banana. I loved the variety of bananas in Southeast Asia, especially the pigmy ones, which were extra yellow and extra sweet.
“He talk about … how do you say … ‘miracle,’” said Bounmy.
“What miracle?” I asked with my mouth full.
“Long ago when he was young man, missionary come to village and heal wife.”
“Of what?”
Bounmy giggled again. “How do you say—stink breath? She have stink breath, stink like skunk. Man heal her—breath like flowers. Very nice.”
They both laughed. Then Vang added something.
Bounmy grinned. “Then they make many children. Good miracle.”
Vang beamed.
“It’s a cute story,” I said.
Fssshtttt!
“Don’t you believe in miracles, Frangi?” Grandma Gerd asked, shaking a Polaroid of the Paint by Numbers Jesus. At least she wasn’t going to try to buy or steal it. Her unscrupulousness did have limits, after all.
“Sure. I believe in the miracle of science and the miracle of modern technology and, of course, Miracle Whip.” I laughed at my wit.
“You must keep ’em in stitches in Port Ann,” said Hanks. “Bet that John Pepper thinks you’re a laugh riot.”
“Shut up!” I threw a peel at him. He caught it deftly in midair.
Grandma Gerd adjusted her glasses and gave me an inscrutable look. “There’s more to life than the tangible.”
“Must go,” said Bounmy, getting up from the table. “Take two more day and night to reach beetle.”
The three of us began to strap on our daypacks and replace our rubber flip-flops with boots.
“Tell Vang it’s been a fantastic experience,” said Grandma Gerd to Bounmy. “That his hospitality—”
“Eeeoww!” Hanks threw his jungle boot onto the bamboo floor and clutched his right foot. Bounmy hurried over and just as he was about to pick up the boot:
“No!” shouted Hanks.
Out crawled a foot-long centipede.
“Ta Prohm!” I said.
“No, centipede,” said Bounmy. “Bite much worse than scorpion.” Before he could smash it with the other boot, it escaped through the bamboo slats.
Hanks’s foot swelled three times its normal size. His face turned red, and he sweated profusely. He seemed to have difficulty breathing.
Apparently this was the “normal” reaction to a centipede bite.
“It’s a good thing he isn’t allergic to the venom. With no medical facilities, he’d be dead before sunset,” said Grandma.
“I told you this trip was a bad idea!” I found myself shouting. “That we’d be putting ourselves at risk! No cell phone, no help in emergencies, and Bounmy doesn’t even have a first-aid kit!”
“We have Spider Flower weed,” said Bounmy, pointing to Peace entering with a small wooden bowl of salve. “The root, it cool. The flower it dis-disin—”
“Disinfects?” said Grandma. “Good, good. Oftentimes the homeopathic cures are better than the commercial. And this is the next best thing to ice. Which we’re sure not going to find up here.”
Peace carefully applied the salve to Hanks’s red bulbous foot. He winced. Grace blotted his forehead with a towel and gave him a drink of water.
“Why isn’t anyone sucking the venom out of his toe?” I asked, exasperated. “It’ll spread—”
“Calm down, Frangi. That’s only for snakebites. And actually, I think that’s been proven ineffective—”
“How do you feel?” I asked Hanks.
Hanks turned his head and vomited. All over my foot.
It was evident that Hanks wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. He had to stay off his foot, rest, drink liquids, and pop Grandma Gerd’s Extra-Strength Tylenol every four hours. The fact he wasn’t allergic lessened the urgency of the situation (although I refused to forgive Grandma Gerd or Bounmy or No Road Travel for putting him in it). Eventually, the swelling would go down and the pain would diminish. It didn’t look like he’d be making the journey back down the mountain for at least three days.
So much for Homestay Night of Romance #2.
Hanks insisted Grandma Gerd, Bounmy, and I finish the last three days of the trek.
“Go on,” said Hanks, in a hoarse voice. “Bond with your grandma. Don’t know about you, but I wanna know The Big Secret.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay—”
“What are you still doin’ here? Get yer keister movin’!” That took his last ounce of energy. He flopped back onto the mat.
Grandma agreed. “We’re not much use here, Frangi. Might as well finish what we started.”
“Peace-nurse-YourHanks,” said Peace shyly in stilted English.
Your Hanks. I liked that.
As I turned away, Hanks reached out and grabbed my arm: “Wait.”
Was he going to kiss me good-bye? Here, in front of everyone? How romantic!
“You forgot somethin’.”
He handed me an empty water bottle.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Don’t These Places Only Exist in Nineteenth-Century Novels?
“I can’t believe you’re dragging us up a mountain in search of a stupid beetle,” I said as we paused for a break in the shade after a particularly grueling incline.
“Just … wait … till you … see it. It’s not … just a … beetle … it’s … it’s a … work … of … art.” Normally, this would have been said with vigor. But now Grandma Gerd could barely get the words out, she was panting so hard.
Without Hanks, the trek took on a subdued tone. Although she breathed and sweated heavily, Grandma Gerd managed to keep up with Bounmy and me. For his part, Bounmy smoked more and chatted less. When we paused at a crossroads of two similar trails, he seemed confused. His sassy self-confidence gradually dissolved into a slight pensiveness. Grandma Gerd didn’t seem to notice, but I did. Especially when we passed the same waterfall twice.
“Bounmy, you’re lost.”
“Not lost: scenic route. Enjoyable beauty.” But he wasn’t convincing.
Rain began pitter-pattering on the banana leaves, a hollow sound. Bounmy gave us thin, transparent plastic ponchos. There’s nothing worse than slogging through ankle-deep mud in pouring rain with 100 percent humidity—drenching you from the inside out. Even my underwear was dripping. What was the point of ponchos, anyway? The plastic just prevented the skin from breathing. I was sweating more than I was drinking since we had to conserve water.
Spots appeared before my eyes. I stumbled.
“Here. It’s an electrolyte packet,” said Grandma Gerd, grabbing me before I fell. “Put it in your water and drink it now.”
I followed orders.
“We have to be extra careful not to get dehydrated out here,” she said, pouring a packet in her own bottle.
“Caution! Leeches!” sang Bounmy as he slogged through a deep puddle.
Was that something crawling up my leg? A foot-long centipede, maybe?
I forced myself to look down—just a floating piece of fern.
We made it to the next Hmong village by sunset. Bounmy practically melted with relief. “Here we are, madams!”
We were instantly surrounded by a group of children. Clustering around us, not for money or handouts, but just to watch us. No Road Travel was right: Very few Westerners trekked this way, if at all. The children were mesmerized by our Western looks. And they actually jumped back when Grandma’s camera spit out a Polaroid.
“Delight in the most spectacular of sunsets. I shall return,” Bounmy said with a flourish of his cigarette, his confidence restored. We sat on large white rocks facing the descending burgundy lozenge in the pink-and-blue-striped sky. The c
hildren pressed in around us. Their hair smelled like smoke.
Grandma Gerd drew caricatures of the kids in her Everything Book. She pointed to a little girl with watery brown eyes and a big smile and said, “You!” and rapidly sketched her in a few broad, cartoony strokes. The kids giggled and squeezed around us tighter and tighter till they were breathing down our necks. Although they were adorable, they had runny noses and dirt covering every inch of skin. All I could think of was: germs.
“You!” Grandma pointed at a cheeky boy missing a front tooth. She drew him riding a giant pig. He laughed uncontrollably, literally doubling over.
I couldn’t believe how genuinely entertained they were by mere pencil sketches.
However, two children contrasted with the rest: a three-year-old boy with watery eyes and a scratched-up face as if he’d fallen onto gravel. And a six-year-old girl with a tangled mass of hair and the dirtiest face of all, who carried around a bundle of pointed sticks that were some sort of game to her: She’d drop them on the ground and then pick them up one by one. Then drop them again and pick them up one by one. And again. When another girl tried to play with her, she screeched, snatched up all her little sticks, and ran away. The rest of the kids all exchanged knowing looks. As the kids turned their attention back to Grandma Gerd’s next drawing, the girl carefully examined each stick to make sure it indeed belonged to her collection.
“Madams, prepare to meet your accommodation for the night,” said Bounmy, coming toward us. We realized the coral-striped sunset had faded and darkness was falling. The children and their parents hurried inside their huts. Within minutes, Bounmy, Grandma Gerd, and I were the only humans outside.
A dog yowled.
I shivered.
“Animist tribe. Very superstitious. Scared of spirits—jungle spirits that come out at night,” said Bounmy.
No wonder the aura here was different than the one at Vang’s village.
A chill descended. The black palms silhouetted against the grey sky like a collage cut out of construction paper.
I shivered again. This time from the cold.
The first thing we noticed about our homestay was that the hut was positioned away from the rest of the village. Secondly, both Stick Girl and Scraped-Face Boy were among the children of the house. Thirdly, the parents and six other adult relatives who seemed to live there weren’t exactly friendly. They weren’t hostile, just standoffish and apathetic. And every single one had vacant eyes. They sat on odd wooden stools (which resembled a shoeshine boy’s stool that had to be balanced carefully or you’d topple over) and stared at the two Western women who’d invaded their space. Space that wasn’t even enough for all thirteen members of their clan, let alone the three-member trekking team. And fourthly, the hut couldn’t have been more paltry (not to mention grungy): dirt floors, a central fire, and a rectangular, raised platform made of bamboo in the back corner. Our bed for the night.
“Voilà!” Bounmy said, waving his arm around the hut. “The home of Mr. Ly and family.”
Mr. Ly was a sullen forty-year-old with matted hair, yellow teeth, and a prematurely aged face. He wore a soiled white T-shirt and black ripped shorts. Mrs. Ly was basically the female version of her husband with longer hair and a faded red sarong.
“Time for Bounmy to cook!” said our guide, trying to keep our spirits up.
During dinner, the family silently shoveled Bounmy’s tasty noodles into their mouths. Stick Girl kept one eye on Grandma Gerd and me as she attempted to pick up rice with her sticks.
How I missed the Vangs.
As we finished our supper, a bony man dressed only in a tattered, black sarong drifted in and headed over to the bamboo platform. He stretched across it and rested his head on my backpack! Mrs. Ly got up from her stool and opened up a little wooden box. She removed a sticky brown substance, which she heated in a metal spoon over a candle.
“What is she doing?” I hissed at Grandma Gerd.
“Opium.”
Opium!
Sure enough, Mrs. Ly set up the standard opium pipe you might read about in the more melodramatic novels, and the scrawny neighbor puffed away. A sickly, sweetish odor filled the hut.
I turned to Bounmy. “Look! They’re doing opium—right there! On our bed!”
Bounmy looked up from his bowl of rice. “Ah, yes. He will finish before sleep time.”
No wonder the only two “strange” kids came from this particular hut—it was the village opium den!
At that moment, Mr. Ly began smoking something from a bamboo tube, which he passed around to the adults in his family. And that certainly wasn’t tobacco I smelled.
Bounmy said consolingly, “They are tribal people. They smoke opium and hashish. That is what they do.”
“The Vangs didn’t!”
But he wasn’t listening.
“I thought opium dens went out in the 1800s,” I said to Grandma.
“Oh, no. Still going strong. You get your good eggs in Southeast Asia as well as your bad eggs. Doesn’t help when it’s sanctioned by the government.”
I coughed.
“I think we’d better step outside for some fresh air or else you’ll be experiencing something you’d rather not,” said Grandma Gerd, getting to her feet. Unobtrusively, she slipped something into her fisherman’s pants pocket—one of Stick Girl’s sticks.
Really, she will stop at nothing!
We took advantage of the situation by getting ready for bed outside, using my Maglight. Neither Bounmy nor No Road Travel had prepared us for the lack of running water—no running water whatsoever. All we had were the bottles of water Bounmy carried, and we had to conserve those for drinking. We were sweaty, caked with dirt, and absolutely reeked—and forced to sleep that way.
I used a portion of our water supply to carefully wash my sole contact lens. Grandma Gerd directed the beam of light on my hands so I could see what I was doing.
The beam drifted away toward the bushes, leaving me in darkness.
“Hey!”
“Ooops, sorry.” She redirected the beam back toward my hands. “Just thought I heard something.”
After my contact lens had been safely put away in its plastic case, I said in exasperation, “What’s the point of all this?”
“Hmm?” Grandma was still distracted by the rustling in the bushes.
“Why steal my passport? Why the trek? Why a ruffled beetle? Why spend all your savings to bring me out to Southeast Asia in the first place?”
She finally focused on me. I’d never seen her look so solemn. Her tanned face looked beige and strained. “You know, I’m wondering if it was such a good idea after all.”
My stomach plummeted. Great. Perfect time to have second thoughts. When we’re smack-dab in the middle of nowhere.
“Here’s our culprit,” said Grandma as a pot-bellied piglet emerged from the bushes and trotted on by.
As I crouched behind those same bushes while Grandma stood guard (the Ly family didn’t even have an outhouse!), it suddenly occurred to me I was squatting. Effortlessly. After weeks of resisting, unable to do the “relaxing butt-to-heel position,” I’d finally achieved it! And Hanks was right: It was easy. My legs weren’t shaking or hurting. Now I could squat-squat-squat for hours. Had I become more limber?
When the last opium addict finally rolled off our bed, Bounmy rolled out our rubber mats. Matting had been spread across the floor and the Ly adults were already sleeping in a row, with their heads touching the thin bamboo-slatted wall and their feet pointing toward the center of the room. The children all slept in the one part of the hut that was an enclosed room, shut off from the rest.
The fire still crackled but barely took the edge off the chill.
The mountain air was now almost frigid.
I checked under the platform for any curled-up centipedes.
Bounmy deposited a blanket on each mat. “Dish towel” was more like it: four feet long and two feet wide—with all the heft of a Kleenex. It barely skimme
d the tops of my ankles and ended at my chin. Vang’s blankets had been gargantuan in comparison.
Grandma Gerd and I were exhausted and filthy—and now this. Our morale took a nosedive. But Bounmy explained that the blankets were all that No Road Travel had packed for us. Evidently, they still had some kinks to iron out in their “Trek Where No Trekker Has Gone Before” package. We rummaged through our backpacks and put on every piece of clothing we’d brought: pants, pj’s, both shirts, both pairs of socks. Layered. But that didn’t stop the cold from seeping into our bones. I’d never been so cold before when trying to sleep.
After shivering on our mats for twenty minutes, Grandma Gerd hissed: “Here. Take a Xanax. It’s the only way you’ll get any sleep. I have two left.”
“No thanks.” How hypocritical of her to offer me drugs—albeit prescription ones—after what we’d just witnessed!
“Sure? You’ve taken them before with no side effects—”
“Not of my own volition, in case you’ve forgotten.”
She shrugged and popped them both. Then handed me a spearmint Life Saver.
“I already brushed my teeth.”
“It’s a clue.”
“What’s it supposed to be?”
“An ‘O,’ what else?”
“Admit it: You’re just giving me random letters until I go home. At this rate, I’ll have the entire alphabet in my carry-on.”
“Nope. This is the last one. You now have all the letters to spell out The Big Secret.”
For some reason, I couldn’t get too worked up about it.
I turned the Life Saver over and over in my numb fingers. Anything to distract me from my freezing extremities.
D-A-D-E-P-T-O. Taped? Do? Addet? Pot? Deto? Top a ded? Peat odd? Todd Ape?
“Is it a name?”
But Grandma Gerd just exhaled in response. How could she be asleep already? I’d have to save it for another day. By now, my intellectual curiosity was waning. What could be that important, anyway? Knowing her, it was probably something anticlimactic. Much Ado About Nothing.