The Caprices Read online

  “The other Australian. The old man.” Gary bobbed his head up and down. “I am worried . . . He hasn’t been to breakfast the last two days. He isn’t a late riser like you, Mr. Ned.”

  Bob Cairns, the sheep and goat expert, had arrived a few days before. Ned had been working on the management end of the project, a lot of noodle lunches with local politicians, and hadn’t even had a chance to sit down with him; he’d seen Bob in the lobby—thin gray hair that stood up like a wheat field. Ned pulled on a pair of jeans, then walked barefooted and barechested down the hallway. Gary turned the key slowly in the lock. A cockroach crawled out from beneath the door, waving anxious antennae. The smell was atrocious. Ned stepped back from the doorway. He leaned on the wall gazing at the yellowed wallpaper as the floral pattern danced out of the dusty background. He didn’t need to look. He had broken into a sweat. Gary looked up at him, imploringly.

  “Poor old bugger,” said Ned. “I guess his ticker went.”

  Bob’s journey ended in Pataya on an inauspicious Australia Day bathed in brilliant sunshine. Ned and his friend Gavin had rented a boat—the Angel II—some fishing poles, and a wiry Thai named Korn, who was Gary’s brother-in-law. The beer was protected in a bucket of ice with a wet towel thrown over it; Ned and Gavin had already put a serious dent in the supply and were feeling merry, even though the topic of conversation was Bob.

  “Not a bloody thing. No next of kin. All they had was some defunct address in Western Australia. So I had him cremated. It was the least I could do,” said Ned.

  Gavin popped open another beer. “Then you drove around with him in the boot of your car for half a year?”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Ned looked out at the waves. Ned had been waiting for some sort of instructions from the company—what was he supposed to do with Bob’s ashes?—but no one seemed willing to take on the responsibility. At first Ned found driving around with Bob Cairns darkly amusing. He started making conversation, as if Bob were in the passenger seat, rather than bouncing around in the boot of his car with the tool box and spare tire. One night, Ned took the urn with him into the Blue Jeans Bar in Bangkok and told the fellows that Bob Cairns had finally decided to come out for a drink. But recently Ned had heard whispering coming over the back seat, harsh echoes usually in the dead of night, and although he’d clocked this phenomenon up to a combination of ephedrine and Mekong whisky, Ned had decided that it was time for Bob to go. Australia Day was as good as any. Besides, his girlfriend back home had told him that you scattered ashes across the sea. This was the right thing to do.

  Ned held the railing of the boat and watched a parasailing tourist being dragged across the sky. Ned thought he was probably German, like most of the tourists, and noted the helium balloon-shaped shadow that he cast on the water. “Beautiful day. Clear sky, all except for Herr Tourist up there.”

  Gavin laughed. “Well, then, let’s do it. All the fish will be off for happy hour if we don’t get a move on.”

  Ned unzipped his duffel bag and took out the urn. “Bob, Gavin. Gavin, Bob.”

  “I knew Bob,” said Gavin.

  “Then why didn’t you say so?”

  “Never met him,” said Gavin. “In 1985 we were here in Pataya for the Year of Clean Water conference at the Hilton. Bob gave some talk on livestock management and water contamination. Couldn’t have been that long before he died. Anyway, I saw him taking a bathe not too far from here. It was early, maybe six. I was stumbling down the beach coming back from . . . well, that doesn’t matter. He wasn’t swimming, didn’t go into the water beyond his waist, just seemed to walk about at that level. I sat down to have a smoke. He finished, came back up the beach for his towel, and then I saw his legs. They looked like they’d been attacked by a shark or something. There were these huge, round scars, whole chunks of flesh gone. I’ve never seen anything like it. Those legs could have told a story.”

  “So could Bob, if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t.”

  Ned unscrewed the cover of the urn and Gavin opened the bottle of Swan Lager, which was to follow Bob into the sea. Bob was from Western Australia and, although Ned and Gavin knew nothing else, they felt sure that Bob had downed some Swans in his time.

  “What if he was religious?” asked Ned.

  “What if he wasn’t?” Gavin looked at the urn and sniffed its contents. “Hell, he’s been in God’s hands for a while now.”

  “God’s hands,” said Ned, “and my boot.”

  “I can sing something,” said Gavin. “I’ll sing him a sheep song. ‘The Drover’s Dream.’”

  Ned nodded in approval. Gavin cleared his throat and started in on the song, in a surprisingly lovely voice.

  “One night while traveling sheep, me companions lay asleep,

  ’Twas not a star to ’luminate the sky.

  I was dreamin’ I suppose, for my eyes were nearly closed,

  When a very strange procession passed me by.

  First there came a kangaroo, with his swag of blankets blue.

  A dingo ran beside him as his mate.

  They were traveling mighty fast, but they shouted as they passed,

  You’ll have to jog along, it’s getting late.”

  Gavin sang on about the dreaming man, the singing crows and dancing koalas, flute-playing bandicoots and smiling lizards, and how the drover awoke only to find himself beneath his cart, confused and unconvinced that it had all been a dream.

  Bob’s ashes were stroked across the waves, sucked into the sea’s mouth, spat out on the surface. They etched stories where no one would see them and read their traces. The body was no longer. Once, Bob had struggled against it. He’d thought, This body’s going to starve and then stop and I’ll go along with it, so I better take care of it, ’cause what’s the point in going on without a body? And as he heard the monkeys screaming in the canopy of the jungle growth he thought that if he let his body quit that’s all he’d be, a monkey’s scream. After that, when he heard the monkeys call to one another, he thought that it was Sean, or Paul, or his brother Mark reminding him that they were freed from their corpses but still trapped along the railroad.

  Hard to piece it all together, that time. Three years spent that somehow wound themselves into one long second. How long had Mark managed to survive? It was hard to tell. They had been captured together in Indonesia, some distant place where the enemy was still a Japanese soldier and not starvation, where one shouldered a rifle and not a shovel. They made the journey in the hull of the boat, surrounded by pounding waves and dying of thirst. Stopover in Burma. Destination Thailand. Mark had been strong then. He was down from his usual 190 pounds, but was still large and imposing. Bob had always been wiry and, as Mark was whittled away until he weighed only 126, Bob seemed little changed in comparison.

  How can you understand the greater purpose of your labor when all you can see is one tiny portion? Bob thought of the Egyptian slaves dragging blocks of stone. Did they even know what a pyramid was or why they were building it? He didn’t know. Railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere going to the end of the earth, ties laid in the jungle—men falling dead of exhaustion and lack of food. Sometimes Bob would imagine, as he shoveled, that beneath the tons of mud there’d be a door. The door would lead to his mother’s kitchen—no people, just the kitchen—and a steak would be frying heartily on the stove.

  The Japanese saw that Bob’s brother was an ox during the first week of construction. Four Americans or seven Dutch to one Aussie worker, they said, and Mark was equal to two of his countrymen. Even with dysentery and the first signs of beriberi Mark labored on the railroad, that magical artery, which they had learned would link Bangkok to Burma and eventually India. The railroad meant victory for the Japanese; the POWs were an expendable resource, a lucky find to achieve this end. Side by side, Bob and his brother shoveled the endless mud toward an Allied defeat. Often they were waist deep in fetid water, careful not to go in any deeper, if it was possible. That was what the Dutch doctor said. His Eng
lish wasn’t good enough to explain why at first, but he would learn the word “cholera.”

  The mind slipped as the body labored. Bob’s thoughts twisted and soared, escaping the pain of his overtaxed muscles. Once, while his mind had been flying around, he had fallen to the ground beneath a blow delivered by a guard. Bob wasn’t sure what his body had done to inspire this, and he really didn’t care. He thought he’d stay lying there. Maybe he’d just die like that, and that would be better. Maybe death would offer a moment’s peace, but something rebelled, something he could not understand, and he’d forced himself up and back to work. Some strange spirit inhabiting Bob’s body wanted to live.

  Or maybe it was just Mark whispering as he shoveled, “You’ll be right,” that raised Bob to his feet. Bob thought about the sheep-shearing competitions back home, which Mark always won. The other shearers said it wasn’t fair. Smiling, they said that Mark hypnotized the sheep. He would pull one from the pen, flip it on its back, and whisper to it, “You’ll be right.” The sheep would lie still then, beneath the clippers. In a few seconds, expertly shorn with barely a nick, they’d leave his reassuring hold.

  The art of hypnotizing sheep. This was serious business, as far as Bob was concerned, but Paul and Sean, who were city boys from Perth, didn’t understand. They had a joke about it. “Mark’s hypnotized that Korean guard,” they said. “Mark’s got him eating out of his hand.” The guard did like Mark, although he was careful that the Japanese officers didn’t notice. His respect for the great Australian expressed itself in extra helpings of rice and the occasional egg that made it into Mark’s dinner. “He treats you like the prize ram,” Bob whispered to his brother. “Be careful. You know what prize rams are used for.” And Mark had nodded, laughing at his brother’s concern. “Breeding stock,” Mark said.

  The Korean guard shot himself one evening, wasted one of the emperor’s bullets into his skull. The guard had visited Bob, who was down with wet beriberi, right before he did it. Bob’s body was distended and bulging with fluid; his testicles were as large as grapefruit. He was surprised when the Korean guard came into the hut that served as an infirmary. The guard’s hair stood straight up, but Bob could not remember if it always did that, or if his shock of black hair just looked frightening now that the man seemed so disturbed. Bob saw an unnatural sweat on his brow and noted the way he moved—crazed and afraid—like a sheep with magnesium deficiency. The Korean touched Bob’s shoulder, which was a strange and disquieting gesture. “Same, same, prison-uh,” he said, motioning in a way that made it clear that as far as he was concerned, Koreans and Australians were in a similar position. Then he left. Shortly after that, Paul came in. “Are you in for that ulcer?” Bob had asked. Paul shook his head and glanced at the pussing hole on his leg. He produced a cigarette, which was a minor miracle, and a stick with a glowing ember to light it with. Bob took the cigarette. Paul had been sent out on the same work detail as Mark, and Bob knew immediately. Paul said, “I fell down. Mark was helping me up and someone saw. That Korean guard . . .” The guard had been ordered to smash in Mark’s head with the flat back of a shovel. Then they heard the gunshot ring out and the monkeys screamed.

  Bob survived the beriberi. The Dutch doctor had scrounged some rice husks from an abandoned village and made biscuits with them, which were a source of vitamin B. He decided the reason he’d survived was to carry back Mark’s spirit and that was enough. In his mind he heard Mark’s mantra often: “You’ll be right. You’ll be right.” Then he’d look to the jungle ceiling, not sure of what he’d see, conscious of Mark’s spirit trapped like a mosquito in the net of vines. Bob was convinced that Mark was still watching over him, as he’d always done. Sometimes, he’d hear his brother’s voice. “Christ, Bob, take care of yourself. Those ulcers’ll kill you.” And Bob would whistle up at the leafy sky the first bar of “The Drover’s Dream,” and Mark would finish off the line.

  Bob left his battle against beriberi, and starvation once more became his number-one adversary. He remembered Mark sitting high on his horse, his face set in grim determination. Life had not been easy on the station those prewar years.

  “The whole fucking country’s gone broke,” Mark had said, shaking his head.

  Bob mounted his horse and trotted up beside him. “Which ones do we shoot?” he asked.

  Mark held the rifle in his lap, looking down on it in a pained way. “We shoot the ones that aren’t gonna make it.” The slaughter was to ensure that some had food, but killing one’s own flock was not easy; the sheep were their life blood—Australia rides on the sheep’s back, people said—and this was poor gratitude.

  Sean turned to Bob, who was still on the station shooting sheep, and said, “Do you know the Yanks gamble their rice?”

  “What?”

  “The Yanks, they gamble their rice.”

  “What if you keep losing?”

  Sean nodded in an emphatic, disgusted way. “They let each other starve. They con each other out of life.”

  Bob thought about this for a minute. “Sometimes, the weak make way for the strong,” he whispered, but Sean did not hear. He was too involved sharpening a spoon edge—which was the only surgical instrument in camp—for the doctor. Sean went on to talk about the Poms and their divine right, the Dutch and their cowardice, worked his way up to the Korean guards, and then the Japanese themselves. But Bob knew that among all of these, the real enemy was time and the real war was between its passage and one’s body.

  “Take care in the not breaking of the skin,” the Dutch doctor said. “Infection likes it. That is why the tropical ulcer.” Easier said than done. Down the river, the Aussie doctor lopped off the limbs infected with the deep pussing wounds, legs mostly. But the Dutch guy, he knew better. On the railroad, they had marines in place of anesthesia. Four marines, one for each limb, and a good friend to hold one’s head. And the spoon nicely sharpened to scoop away the dead flesh, which ate the living. And now Bob, ready for surgery, lying flat on his back pinned down, Paul at his head the way Bob had been for him before. Bob had seen this done many times and his fear was that of one who knew. He could not scream loud enough. Men died hiding their ulcers, more fearful of the cure than of the disease. He was not one of these. His scream rang out. His life held on in the mud and terror and could not escape. When the marines finally released him and he looked into the doctor’s eyes, which were calm and sympathetic, he thought that little had been done to save him. The truly dead flesh was within, hidden beneath the layers of taut skin, tissue, and bones, in a place where the doctor’s spoon could not remove it.

  Of the three in their group that were left, Paul was the sickliest. His battles with amebic dysentery were bloody and hard fought. Sean watched over him like a mother. He would sit by Paul’s bedside, filled with fear and worry.

  “You know, Bob, this is all right for us, but not for Paul. He was at the university. He studied physics,” Sean said.

  “Still doesn’t make it right for anyone,” said Bob.

  “No, listen. He signed up with me because he thought I was too bloody stupid to make it alone.”

  “What’d he think we’d be doing out here? Solving problems?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Paul shouldn’t be here.”

  Which made it seem to Bob as though Sean found the situation tolerable for the rest. Paul took a turn for the worse and was delirious much of the time. Bob found it strange when he entered the hut one evening and found Paul alone, without his usual nurse.

  “How’re you doing, Paul?” asked Bob.

  “Debloodylightful,” said Paul. Profanity put Bob’s mind at ease. Sean appeared at the door of the hut. At first he revealed himself in silhouette, but after he stepped out of the shadow, Bob saw that Sean’s shorts were gone and in their place was a kind of G-string—a loose swatch of cloth that draped around his loins like a diaper.

  “Now there’s one the midwife should have strangled,” said Paul.

  Sean was smiling. He made his way over quick
ly and produced two small bricks wrapped in banana leaves. “One for Paul, and one for Bob and me to split. It’s sugar.”

  “And where are your shorts?” asked Paul.

  “Covering some Burmese backside,” he replied.

  Paul struggled onto one elbow. He looked over at Sean and managed a smile. “Out of gratitude for your generosity, I will recover.” And he lived.

  Paul looked terrible, sicker than the sick, emaciated to the point that it was almost comic that he wasn’t dead. Paul had one tooth left, sticking up from his lower gum like a tombstone. His shorts had rotted off his body and he too, like Sean, was now in a diaper, which showed off every protrusion and hollow. He became the object of envy, since he no longer did hard labor. Rumor had it that the Japanese soldiers were scared of him, that they couldn’t figure out which dimension he belonged to; he was a constant memento mori, a specter that wouldn’t quit. Paul worked with the doctor when he could, and lay down when he couldn’t. Sean was pleased at the state of affairs. He had always been a little simple, but as time progressed, he seemed downright loony. He seemed to think that Paul had left the study of physics in Australia for medical school in Thailand.

  Bob continued shoveling ten hours a day, seven days a week. Each day someone died and he found himself scanning the gang’s faces in the morning, trying to figure out who it would be. He saw the same searching eyes focus on him. He was now about ninety five pounds and looked downright skeletal. Bob marveled at Paul, wondering how anyone could make him look good. Sixty pounds was missing and where was it? Lost in the mud below the pillars that pressed the railroad into the sky. Lost with the bodies that they’d buried in yesterday’s embankment, handy filler when one couldn’t place a call to a quarry for stone.

  One evening Sean came running up to where Bob and Paul sat. Sean was laughing hysterically and at first Bob thought he’d gone off, like the rice that he was eating.

  “Want to hear something really funny?” Sean said.

  A couple of months had passed since someone had said that, and Bob and Paul were at a loss as to how to respond.