Saving Fish From Drowning

  “No, you’re not!” Esmé sobbed. “You play a stupid dog trainer on a TV show. You make them do stupid pet tricks.”

  “I’m also a veterinary doctor.”

  Esmé’s sobs subsided into sniffles. “For real? You’re not just an actor?” She eyed Harry, assessing whether to let go of her distrust.

  “For real,” Harry acknowledged, using this Americanism he normally despised. He began to talk to the puppy. “Hey, little wiggle-waggle, not feeling so well?” Harry opened the puppy’s mouth and expertly peered at its gums, touching them lightly. He pinched up the skin on the puppy’s back and let it fall back. “Gums are quite pale,” he noted out loud. “See here? Slightly grayish. And see how the skin slowly drapes. Dehydration.” He lifted the puppy and peered at its underside. “Mm. And it’s a little lassie. . . . With a hernia in her umbilicus . . . About five weeks old, I reckon, likely not properly weaned.”

  “A lassie,” Esmé said wondrously. Then: “Can you save her? Those girls in the hotel were just going to let her die. That’s why I had to take her with me.”

  “Of course you did,” Harry said.

  “But darling,” Marlena intervened, “the sad, sad thing is, we can’t bring a dog with us, no matter how much—”

  Harry put his palm up to indicate that her tack was going to backfire. He continued petting the pup as he spoke to Esmé. “She is a beauty.” And then in tones of admiration: “How in the world did you get her past security and onto the plane?”

  Esmé demonstrated by draping the triangled make-do scarf as a sling for her arm. She put a zippered sweatshirt over that. “It was easy,” she said proudly. “I walked right through. She never made a peep.”

  Marlena looked at Harry, and for the first time since the debacle at the temple, their hearts and minds sought one another.

  “What are we going to do?” Marlena mouthed.

  Harry took charge. “Esmé, do you know when it last ate?”

  “I tried to give her some eggs this morning. But she’s not very hungry. She ate only a tiny bit, and when she burped, it came up. ”

  “Mm. How about her stools?”

  “Stools?”

  “Has she been making any poops?”

  “Oh, that. She’s peed, but no—you know, none of what you called the other. She’s really well behaved. I think whatever it is has to do with that lump on her belly.”

  “Umbilical hernia,” Harry said. “That’s not necessarily serious or uncommon. Rather prevalent in toy breeds. Strangulation of the intestines could be a problem later, but most resolve in a few months’ time, or if needed, it can be repaired with surgery.” He knew he was saying more than was necessary, but he wanted Esmé to believe completely in his ability to help.

  Esmé stroked the puppy’s fur. “So what’s wrong with her? Sometimes when she gets up, she runs really fast like she’s crazy, then she falls over.”

  “Could be hypoglycemia.” He hoped to God it was not parvo. “We need to get her rehydrated at the very least, and right away.” He stood up and called to the others on the bus. “Would anyone by chance have a medicine dropper?”

  A terribly long silence. And then a small voice asked, “I have an eyedropper, but would a sterile needle and syringe be better?” That was Heidi.

  Harry was too surprised to answer at first, then blurted, “You must be joking. You have one?” And when Heidi’s face reddened and fell with embarrassment, he revised himself quickly: “What I mean is, I didn’t expect—”

  “I brought it in case of accidents,” he heard Heidi explain. “I read that you should never get a transfusion in a foreign country. AIDS is rampant in China and Burma, especially on the border.”

  “Of course. Brilliant.”

  “I also have tubing.”

  “Of course.”

  “And dextrose . . . in an IV solution.”

  “Wow!” Esmé said. “That’s so cool.”

  Harry scratched his head. “That’s . . . that’s absolutely amazing. . . . I’m not sure if we should use them. After all, if we used your emergency supplies, they would not be usable later, if, well, you know, an accident did happen—”

  “That’s okay,” Heidi said right away. “That’s why I brought it, for any emergency, not just for me. I also have glucose tablets, if you want to try those instead.”

  Harry again couldn’t help registering surprise.

  “I’m hypoglycemic.” Heidi raised her right wrist and displayed her MedicAlert bracelet.

  Harry figured Heidi had what was often referred to in medical circles as “Marin County disease,” a vague unhappiness that led people, women in particular, to complain of sudden weakness, shakiness, and hunger. Heidi had the medical knowledge and equipment of a hypochondriac. “Well, then,” Harry said, “the eyedropper will do for now, if you would be willing—”

  “Yes, yes.” Heidi was in fact delighted. For once, her arsenal of remedies would come in handy. “I need to get into my suitcase first.”

  Heidi dug out her medical supplies, and the others scoured their hand luggage for items that might be useful: a wool cap for the puppy’s bed. A facecloth as washable bedding. A pretty ribbon the puppy might wear once she was well and happily licking the faces of her saviors.

  While Harry, Esmé, and Marlena tended to the sick puppy, the rest of the group followed Lulu out of the bus. Dwight went over to the side of the road and unzipped his fly.

  It annoyed Vera that he was peeing within eyesight of her, that he assumed it was the responsibility of others to avert their eyes. The audacity. He controlled the group by acting as if he were the exception to every rule. He demanded alternatives when none should have been suggested. Grousing to herself, she trudged deeper into the tall grass to find her privacy. The brush closed in on her and she looked up at the clear sky, at its directionless blue. She was engulfed, disoriented, and she enjoyed the sensation, knowing she was not actually lost. She could still hear voices a few yards away. She lifted her dress, careful to bunch up the voluminous material so that she did not accidentally soil herself. How did the ladies of Victorian days manage to relieve themselves with those gigantic hoopskirts and petticoats?

  In her wallet she carried a photo of a young black woman standing in front of painted scenery, solemnly staring at something off to the side. It was her future, Vera liked to think. Her hair was coiffed in the style of the times, wound and pinned, and she wore a high-collared black dress, an oval pendant at her throat, with a skirt that was smooth in front and in back as full as a Christmas tree. This was her great-grandmother, Eliza Hendricks. Vera often felt that woman in her soul; she had been a teacher at one of the first colleges for black women. Eliza had also published a book called Freedom, Self-Reliance, and Responsibility. For years, Vera had tried to find a copy. She had contacted hundreds of antiquarian book dealers. She imagined what Eliza Hendricks had written. As a result, Vera often thought about those subjects: freedom, self-reliance, and responsibility, what it meant then, what it meant now. She had hoped one day to write a book herself about the same themes and include anecdotes about her great-grandmother, if only she could glean more from public records. But in recent years, she felt frustration more than inspiration. What place do freedom and responsibility have when you’re plagued with budget cuts, conniving upstarts, and competing charities? No one had vision anymore. It was all about marketing. She sighed. The trip to China and Burma was supposed to reinvigorate her, help her see the wild blue yonder once again. She looked up at the clouds. The village lay half a mile up a road thick with wild daisies growing eight or nine feet tall.

  All at once, a hair-raising scream echoed down the road. “What the fuck was that?” Moff and Dwight said almost simultaneously. It was coming from the village up ahead. “A girl?” Moff guessed. Heidi pictured a girl being raised in the air by a tribal chief, about to be tossed over a cliff in a sacrificial ritual. Then came a whimper. A dog that was being hit with a shovel? A moment later, it was wheezing and braying
. A donkey being whipped as it struggled to pull a load uphill? Next came what sounded like the blood-curdling cries of a woman. Someone was being beaten. What was going on?

  Moff, Harry, Rupert, and Dwight sprinted up the road, crouching slightly in a protective posture. Roxanne, Wyatt, and Wendy followed. Adrenaline sharpened their eyesight, and heightened their hearing. They were on a mission.

  “Come back!” Heidi shouted, a futile request.

  “No worries,” Lulu said. “That sound, it is only pig not people.”

  “My God, what’s happening to it?”

  “Getting ready for a dinner,” Lulu answered. She drew a finger across her throat. “Zzz.”

  “Gross. People can be so mean and they don’t even know it,” Esmé said. She patted the puppy in the sling.

  The group continued walking to the top of the hill. The screams had subsided into bleating. The pig’s voice grew weaker, softer. Then it stopped. Heidi felt sick. Death had come.

  At the fork in the path, they took the route that was more narrow, believing it would lead to something less seen and more special. To Bennie, the village looked like rural Appalachia. It was a cluster of small hills, winding up-and-down paths that would accommodate slim-hipped people walking in single file. Two or three houses clung to each hill, and around each compound were gardens and animal pens. Smoke from coal fires rose, as did gnats, muddying the air. Along the steeper inclines were steps fashioned out of a chunk of rock or a slim sheath of wood, just wide enough to accommodate a foot. Upright sticks had been pounded into the sides of the path to allow passersby to gain footing as they traversed this thoroughfare on rainy, muddy days.

  They came to a pen that contained enormous pigs with coarse hair. As the visitors approached, the pigs wagged their tails and snorted. Outside the pen, pink piglets roamed freely like pet dogs, seeking handouts from barefooted girls of nine or ten, who carried in one arm their bare-bottomed siblings. “Run, run,” Heidi whispered to the piglets. “You’re doomed.”

  Upon seeing the foreigners approach, three boys engaged in mock battle, whacking at one another with their best replicas of swords. The two smaller boys used sugarcane stalks, but the biggest, a show-off, had chosen bamboo, which was sturdier and quickly reduced the sugarcane swords to limp green shreds. Whack! Whack! They were ancient tribesmen keeping the village safe from invaders. The biggest boy took a running leap onto the back of a water buffalo that was resting on the side of the road. He wrestled the horns of the implacable beast, then gave it a mighty kick in the side, before declaring for himself another victory. The other boys imitated him, getting a running start to vault themselves onto the buffalo and tumbling off its spine like gymnasts at a hillbilly Olympiad. Had the water buffalo been so inclined, it could have risen to its mighty hooves and easily trampled or gored the boys in a second. What had this buffalo done in a past life that he must now serve happily as trampoline and vaulting horse?

  My friends continued until they had come full circle. “This way,” Lulu said, and she walked ahead into the dirt courtyard from where the awful noises had emanated. The freshly killed pig lay on its side on a platform made of stone. Blood pooled from its neck, and some had already been collected in a large bowl, where it could congeal. A grill held a huge pile of kindling twigs. Two men were starting the process of cleaning the pig, knives and buckets at the ready. In a corner, young women were sorting baskets of greens. To the left was a mud-brick house. A man emerged from the lightless interior and walked with authority toward the visitors. He and Lulu exchanged greetings in Jingpo. “How’s your grandmother this week?” she asked. “Much better, I hope.”

  After a few minutes, Lulu waved to my friends. “Come in, he is saying you are welcome to visit in courtyard, ask question, take photo. But he ask you please do not go into house. His grandmother is recently died and she is in there still. Today they get her ready for funeral feast.”

  “They’re going to eat her?” Esmé whispered to her mother. Marlena shook her head.

  “Good God!” Bennie said. “We shouldn’t be here if they’re in mourning.”

  “No, no, is okay,” Lulu assured him. “She was very old, over one hundred and four years and sick for long, long time.”

  “A hundred and four?” Dwight interjected. “That’s impossible.”

  “And why is that?” Vera said.

  He shrugged. He should have let this one go, but he couldn’t. “Look at the conditions here.”

  “I see them,” Vera persisted. “It looks simple but peaceful, free of corporate stress and traffic jams.”

  “Traffic would be the least of their problems,” Dwight said. “There’s no sanitation, no heating. Half the people here don’t have a tooth left in their skull. I doubt they have a stock of antibiotics on hand. And look at those kids. One has a cleft palate, the other has a lazy eye—”

  “It’s called amblyopia,” Vera corrected. She knew about such things; her organization funded a Well Baby Clinic for inner-city mothers.

  Dwight gave her a funny look. “It’s also known as lazy eye.”

  “‘Lazy’ is a pejorative term.”

  Dwight laughed and shook his head. He had had “lazy eye” as a kid.

  Lulu felt an argument brewing. “Come, come. Let’s visit this family. It is good luck for you to come in. If you are in household where someone has died, this dead person will carry away all your bad luck when she goes to the next world.” Had I also taken a load of bad luck with me? “This deed,” Lulu said, “brings a household much good karma. So everyone is happy. Come, let us receive happiness.”

  All at once, Dwight looked stricken. A peculiar queasiness hit him and his stomach began to bloat, growing larger and larger by the second, as though some invisible force were growing, an alien, and now the creature was about to burst out through his stomach wall.

  “Honey?” Roxanne said. “You look terrible. Are you sick?”

  Dwight shook his head. “I’ll be okay.” His nausea doubled. The growing pressure turned into sharp kicks. His face turned the color of goose dung. He was not the sort who complained about pain. He had broken his leg once while skiing, and the sharp bone had protruded out of his skin. He had told jokes to the ski patrol guys who hauled him off the mountain.

  This time he felt that he was about to die. Heart attack! Only thirty-one years old, and he was going to drop dead of a heart attack in a woebegotten village without a doctor and with no ambulance to get him out of there. His mind became confused, drunk with pain and the certainty that he was dying. He stumbled around, desperate for any remedy, deaf to his wife’s anxious questions. Some mysterious force was going to kill him. The old dead woman—they said she was carrying away their bad luck, leaving behind only the good. He was the bad one, whom nobody liked. His eyes locked, trying to hold his system in a tenuous balance. He couldn’t breathe, oh God, he couldn’t breathe. What should he do now? No medicines here. The British vet with the dog. He would have something. Where the hell was he? He glanced to the left, at the darkened house and its open door. Ghost in there. He saw the men with their evisceration tools, staring at him; he was their next victim. He turned and saw his fellow travelers glaring at him. Vera hated him. He knew that. She wanted him dead. Even his wife looked as if she didn’t care what happened to him. They had had an argument the night before. She had called him a self-centered asshole. She had hinted at divorce. He pushed his way past her and fell to the ground.

  Within thirty-seven heaving seconds, Dwight’s stomach emptied itself of its contents. It was the accumulation of three meals that had remained undigested, thanks to the Zanthoxylum berries of the previous night’s dinner, which had anesthetized his gut into stasis. I shall not describe what those contents were, save to say they included many colorful things, which the piglets sought out and squabbled over and devoured.

  A minute later, Dwight felt slightly less doomed. Death had passed him by. Five minutes later, he was able to stand up weakly. But he was a changed man.
He felt defeated, all his bravado gone. Once again he was the boy who had been beaten up by the neighborhood kids, had the wind knocked out of him by a punch to his stomach, then another, and another.

  “Dwight, honey?” Roxanne was asking quietly. “We’re going back to the bus. Can you walk by yourself?”

  He looked up and shook his head, unable to speak. “Can we get a cart?” he heard Vera asking someone.

  “No worries, I ask right now,” Lulu answered.

  Vera added, “We can pay. Here. See if this is enough.” This was her forte, taking charge in a crisis.

  Lulu started shouting to the owners of the house, who shouted back cooperatively with numerous suggestions and, at first, refusals of any compensation. An honorary gift for the deceased? Oh, in that case, it would be too polite, too good to be true.

  Soon a two-wheeled cart was brought over, pulled by the water buffalo that had allowed the sword-fighting boys to jump on its back. Dwight nearly wept with gratitude. Harry and Moff kindly helped lift him. Roxanne’s face was drawn into motherly concern, and she stroked his brow. She still loved him. He wanted to weep. The wonder of love had never felt stronger.

  As the foreigners left the village, the members of the household thanked their dead matriarch for bringing them such good luck: ten U.S. dollars, and for nothing more than taking the cart down to the end of the road. Happiness for all.

  5

  WE ALL DO WHAT WE MUST

  In border towns, everyone waits. So it is in Ruili. The fake-gem hustlers wait for the eager buyers of jade. The hoteliers shine the floors in anticipation of guests. The arms dealers and drug runners look for their contacts.

  My friends were waiting for the border permit that would allow them to enter Myanmar via the northern end of the Burma Road. This was agony for Bennie, who felt responsible for getting them in. He would also be blamed if he did not. He was now eating sunflower seeds every minute of the day, as if each were a problem to be solved. He cracked the shells, looked at the gray bodies inside, and swallowed them like sedatives, wishing he could stop the overwhelming sense of dread and think clearly. In light of the news that no Westerners had recently entered Myanmar via the overland route, he had no idea how he would accomplish getting everyone in. Only a few months earlier, the road had been opened for passage to third-country nationals, but thus far no one had figured out the hellacious and antiquated process necessary to gather paperwork and stamps of approval from the proper authorities. When Bennie checked the group into the hotel in Ruili, he asked the manager whether they might stay longer, if necessary.