The Spy's Little Zonbi Page 11

  Beth was from a large Irish-Catholic family, the fourth-oldest of six children. Her father, Patrick, had been teaching phys-ed for thirty years at a small high school in Western Massachusetts, where he also coached three sports. Her mom was a middle school teacher.

  For more than a year, Beth had been teaching English to junior high aged school children in rural Thailand, about two hours northeast of Bangkok.

  “Teaching English for the Peace Corps is difficult for a number of reasons.” Beth led Chase from the main school building to a series of tiny, raised faculty homes, where she lived with a cat. Chase took notes. “You never really see the good you are accomplishing. I’m always asking myself, ‘so what if they learn to speak English in this part of the country? Is it for them to run away to work at the tourist resorts?’ Those are my down times, my bad days. But the Peace Corps is about sharing cultures, trying to help people understand the way others in faraway places live.”

  Wat Prachamimitr School was in the Bua Yai district, two kilometers from a town of the same name and surrounded by thousands of acres of rice paddies. The school, built with World Bank money, was meticulously kept. The swept pathways were lined with tropical red-flowering bushes. Clusters of ferns and other plants grew at each intersection along the meandering walkways. The dorm and school buildings were long, two-story structures, with dark, gleaming wood floors that the children polished daily with coconut shells. Student uniforms were white collar shirts; boys in brown shorts and girls in matching skirts.

  Three hundred students, ages twelve to fifteen, were taught by two dozen teachers. They also had a small group of younger kids on campus living in a dormitory room lined with bunk beds. The orphanage meant additional government aid for the school. Tuition was the equivalent of sixty cents per week, plus a kilo of family rice. Beth was one of three English teachers, but the only farang, or foreigner. This school would be the last formal education for most of these kids, she explained. For hundreds of years, the children had worked on family farms, eventually taking them over. The farms consisted of small houses, several buffalo, and plots of land to grow rice. The school was a relatively new and not entirely welcome addition to the culture. Some saw the new opportunities made possible for the children as an infringement upon their tradition, Beth explained.

  Chase continued scribbling pages of notes and took a few photos with his Nikon. He shot Beth seated cross-legged in the middle of her main living area, a black cat making slow laps around her, as she smiled and talked and waved her long arms for punctuation. This was the infamous Bat Girl?

  “There’s no air conditioning anywhere.” Beth dug through her clean laundry for a cotton rag she held out for Chase to wipe his face. The heat was overwhelming. “Classrooms have window vents and the doors are left open. The sun may bother them, but not the heat. They try to avoid the sun, but it’ll be ninety degrees and some of the girls will complain about a chilly breeze. In my first lesson plan I tried teaching them about the snowstorms back home, about frozen rivers and night skiing at Mount Tom. But parents complained to my principal I was giving the kids nightmares.” Beth laughed and stroked her cat.

  Just how long Chase was to endure this heat and question-filled mission wasn’t clear. The school had readily offered one of the unoccupied single-room houses near Beth’s, where an elderly teacher had died in bed two years earlier. Nobody on staff had wanted to test the waters regarding his ghost, so a new farang was a welcome guinea pig.

  Chase couldn’t imagine what this young American could have gotten herself into. Or was she just a link to the Bat Girl, an innocent connection?

  The morning classes had been canceled so that Buddhist Monks from a nearby temple could speak to the children about rebirth. Disruptions such as this weren’t uncommon, for the monks made at least twice-monthly visits for various reasons. Just last week, Beth told Chase, they’d come to explain the importance of not playing doctor, following a discovery of children performing medical exams on one another in the closed, one-room infirmary.

  “The monk missed the point, though. He lectured about playing with expensive medical equipment.”

  The three hundred kids sat packed tightly together on a concrete floor in the auditorium, while the faculty occupied wooden chairs along one wall. The monks, Beth explained in a hushed play-by-play translation, told the children that death wasn’t the end of life, but the passing of one living stage to another. The dead are reborn into other life forms. The new life depends on how much merit was gained in a previous life. Good deeds are cumulative and one can be reborn each time into a wealthier, happier life. If enough merit is accumulated, the person will reach Nirvana, a place of no suffering. One of the simplest ways to gain merit, they explained, was to make offerings to the monks. Every morning, the monks walked the streets of the towns and cities with canisters for people to fill with rice and other foods.

  As Beth whispered in Chase’s ear, he searched the faculty from face to face, looking for clues to the Bat Girl mystery, but each teacher had the same look of interest or was trying to get the attention of a child who’d begun to fidget.

  After the monks led a final prayer, the students filed out for lunch, stopping to hunt for shoes among an enormous pile left on the front steps. They laughed and giggled, trying to match shoes that all looked exactly alike.

  “It’s an amazingly spiritual society,” Beth told Chase as the casual interview continued. “Many Thais believe in ghosts. Next to almost every house is a small spirit house on a pole. When a family builds a home, they displace the spirit that was living in the space. To maintain harmony, they put up these small, elaborate houses for the spirits to live in so they won’t haunt the new owners.”

  “I thought they were bird houses.”

  “Ha, every visitor thinks that,” she said, laughing. “People are always asking if Americans believe in ghosts. I tell them it’s the same as here, that some people do and others don’t. But for the believers here, it’s more spiritual, more a way of life. They arrange their lives to be, I don’t know … at one with the spirits. To get along with them, you know? Like our Native Americans. I wish I’d read more about the Navajos and Hopis. My folks are sending me some books.”

  “Is the fear of ghosts mostly with the older generation?”

  “Not fear, really. Respect would be a better way to describe it. The children here are much more innocent than back home, more curious and less cynical. When I first got here, I would be walking down the street and a child would reach out and touch me as we passed.”

  Chase had already experienced this twice on the narrow pathways.

  “So what are the tall, skinny boxes next to the spirit houses?” Oddly shaped structures on tall poles rose parallel to those of the spirit houses. They sat talking on the front porch of her home, and at least a half dozen of these narrow boxes were on this pathway alone.

  “Oh, those are bat houses,” she explained, and for the first time Chase detected a troubled note in her voice. “Peace Corps volunteers have what’s called a crossover specialty. Like English teacher and farming. Or English teacher and well digger. Here, they needed help keeping the mosquito population under control since many of the limestone bat caves have been destroyed. It’s unsafe and just not possible to chemically treat thousands of acres of rice paddies. An outbreak of malaria killed dozens of villagers the year before I arrived. Without a healthy bat population, it’s just a matter of time before everyone becomes sick.”

  “There are bat caves around here?” Chase knew he was closing in on the Bat Girl.

  “Yes. And there are some caves with more than ten million bats. A single colony will eat hundreds of tons of insects each year. There are over a hundred sacred Buddhist caves in Thailand where the bats are protected. A key part of the religion recognizes that to understand human nature, one must be immersed in nature. Caves had awesome acoustics for chanting, and they were a peaceful receptacle of spiritual energy during meditation.”

  “Lik
e singing in the shower?”

  “Yes, right, a combination of harmony and meditation, as well as being places for birth and rebirth. They were the gates into the subterranean world where both demons and angels lived.”

  Beth reached out and corralled her skinny black cat, giving it long strokes down its arched back with her fingernails. The cat purred deeply, collapsing in her lap as she rubbed behind its ears and under its chin. But something had changed. Her smile and energy were gone.

  “These days, when a monk is living in a particular cave, a yellow cloth is hung at the entrance. He’ll meditate and sleep in the cave, only leaving for alms-round, which is when they collect food from villagers. The monk may live there for a few days or even a few years. The caves are either part of a monastery, or are pretty close to one.”

  “I don’t know much about bats, but my grandmother’s horse farm had a barn attic that would pile up with bat droppings.”

  “Well, they spend a lot of time cleaning guano from the rows of Buddha statues as part of their workday. And it’s definitely heads-up at sunset when the bats stir and leave to feed. There’s a particular cave west of Bangkok that’s pretty big with tourists. Some German researchers counted a hundred million bats. Every day, starting at dusk, they leave the cave in a steady stream. It takes three hours before the last one is out.”

  Chase had stopped taking notes beyond her description of building the bat houses for the school. She went on to describe Thailand as having thousands of these caves, created by the mixture of limestone mountain ranges that are carved by the tropical monsoons.

  Chase knew he’d found the Bat Girl.

  A bell was rung from the main school building to signal lunch and Beth set her cat down to lead the way.

  “Can you eat Thai food?” the smiling principal asked Chase, as a female student served the faculty table at the front of the cafeteria. Chase had quickly learned that foreigners were given proper warning about the insanely spicy food.

  Chase was blinking back tears from smelling his lunch when a young serving girl set a plate piled with colorfully dangerous foods in front of him, then quickly reached between his legs and jammed something against his crotch.

  “What the hell?” he almost said aloud, but she was gone in a flash and hadn’t done any damage. Then he felt the gun and slid the small weapon into the deep front pocket of his khakis.

  The girl students lingered over their lunches, chattering away in their singsong language. The boys rushed through the meal to have more time on what Beth called the takraw court. Takraw was a combination of volleyball, soccer, and acrobatics played in an area similar to a volleyball court. Players used heads, knees, and feet to get the ball over the net.

  “Have you seen it played?” Beth led him to a spot along the sideline. “It has to be the least likely sport to ever be embraced by America, but it’s so much fun.”

  The non-takraw playing boys headed for the concrete basketball court, where a game of tackle basketball broke out. That game, a combo of rugby and basketball, would definitely work in America. Several boys were quick to acquire bloody lips and knees. Thai boys appeared quite durable, despite their small size. They would sit dazed from near-concussion blows to the head, but only for a moment, as they were mercilessly teased by their tacklers into rejoining the melee at the other end of the court. Pens and coins jolted from their pockets remained scattered behind. Chase finished shooting his fifth roll of film and scribbled more notes.

  Chase tagged along when Beth carried a banana bunch to her afternoon English class. She was a favorite among the children and they often stopped by her house to visit, Beth told him. She cringed when she described the whippings administered by her coworkers at the school, a popular method of Thai discipline.

  “A rough translation of an old Thai saying goes, ‘If you love your buffalo, you beat him; if you love your child, you beat him. Respect comes from fear.’ ” Beth rolled her eyes.

  “The kids know they can get away with anything with me, and I have a few boys in my class who do. They aren’t interested in learning English. The stereotypical Thai boy goofs around while the girl studies. When they grow up, the men womanize and the women stay at home.”

  Beth explained how she’d lost the respect of some colleagues who found it eccentric that she and her students would pal around. Refusing to use a whip was disrespectful to the culture. She didn’t care.

  After writing exercises, Beth brought out the bananas, placing them on chairs at the front of the class. The children took turns pretending to be at an American market to buy the fruit with broken-English transactions. Beth made notations on the chalkboard as she maneuvered around a sleeping dog named Pete.

  “They remember this stuff,” Beth explained, taking frequent breaks from her lesson to keep Chase filled in. He sat to one side of the class, trying not to be a distraction but failing. A group of girls had their desks huddled together and were giggling as they spied on him over their textbooks. “I’m the wacky, white-skinned teacher to them, but I really don’t do anything much different from any teacher in America.”

  Beth was treated as special from the beginning of her stay, as the principal took her around to the surrounding communities to recruit students. “I was a novelty, a way for him to sell the idea of the school to the farmers. It’s probably best that my Thai wasn’t all that great at the time. I felt like a sideshow freak, the main attraction for kids to come to our school. I resented it then, but I understand it better now.”

  As the school day was winding down, Beth asked the class, “What time is it?” in English. She held a cardboard clock, the hands displaying six-thirty.

  “Nine o’clock,” a boy offered from the middle of the room, and two other boys agreed.

  “No,” Beth said. “Now, what number is this?” She pointed at the six.

  “Twelve!” several children shouted.

  “Six,” a quiet, shy looking girl in the front row finally said. A boy behind her muttered something, perhaps an insult.

  “So what time is it?” Beth asked the class again.

  “Half past six thirty,” was the best guess.

  With the school day over, Beth borrowed a scooter to give Chase a tour of the surrounding countryside. He climbed on behind her and she zigzagged around the lush rectangular fields through a maze of rice paddy dikes. The rice was a velvety green carpet above the water and mud; the air finally cooling an hour or so before sunset. A few farmers trudged behind their buffalo through the heavy muck on their way home, and an old woman yelled and slapped the ground with a walking stick because the scooter agitated her own lumbering beast. To Chase it seemed one heavy downpour would simply submerge this part of the world.

  Beth stopped the scooter at the edge of a wide, muddy lake. Children were swimming and diving from the banks. A man walked neck-deep, about fifty feet from shore, dragging fishing nets. In the distance was a Buddhist Temple built on pilings. Monks bathed in the setting sun, crouched in the water, still wearing bright orange robes.

  As Beth stepped off the little scooter, the children flocked to her. Most were young, pre-school age. They were the children of these farmers, still too young to work in the fields. A tiny girl haltingly made her way up to Beth, who crouched so the girl could stroke her cheek and feel her white skin. It was easy to tell which children hadn’t seen Beth before.

  “This is my special place,” Beth told Chase, as he snapped a few photos even though the light level had dropped too low. The first stars had broken through the purple sky as dusk engulfed the flat land, the sun sinking toward the horizon as though into quicksand.

  “Every once in a while I need to get away, and it’s so beautiful and peaceful here,” she said, the sounds of belly-flops and unseen chickens close by.

  As Beth talked to the group of children nearest her scooter, Chase found a patch of grass on the bank with the least amount of Buffalo dung and lay back on his elbows. The long trip and exotically passive scenery had him off gua
rd and suddenly sleepy. His stomach, working on the burning food, seemed the only restless part of his body.

  But the sudden sleepiness was tinged with something else. There was a swirling, narcotic sensation taking Chase beyond just tired. He tried sitting up but couldn’t. His arms and legs weren’t cooperating. He turned to Beth, tried to focus. She looked back at him with sympathy. Chase was certain she knew what was happening.

  He had found the Bat Girl and now he was poisoned. The two thoughts were crystal clear. Now what?

  Was that popcorn he smelled? Chase imagined he was in a theater for a movie. The darkness swept aside like a giant curtain that opened to intense action. He could almost feel the wind from a giant helicopter swooping in. His body might have been plastered with spraying water and stinging dust. The noise was too much, too loud. Three soldiers hopped out of the chopper carrying a red backboard, black straps flapping violently in the downdraft. They rolled Chase on his side, slipped the stretcher underneath, then carried him back to the hovering craft. He felt the chopper dip slightly from the weight as they climbed aboard.

  Then the Bat Girl was kneeling over him, her pale face vibrating close, as the chopper powered up, surging forward and away from the swirling dust and spray. He tried to ask for her help, but the poison was closing his throat. He struggled to keep his eyes open and focused as Beth was pushed away. One man tore at Chase’s shirt and attached blurry electrode patches. Another grabbed a handful of hair and forced his head back while jamming a turkey baster into his dry throat. The soldier squeezed the bulb, emptying the contents. When it was removed, Chase tasted oil and then leaned to one side and vomited.

  His toes and fingers, which had moments ago been in some other distant room, were now back—cold, and tingling. He tried pulling against the straps with no success, so he concentrated on breathing the good air, watching the helicopter ceiling.