back to the French colonial period. Once the expedition was presented to them, they pounced at the chance for more work. Driving into the night didn’t bother them at all.
It now unfolded that the Heng brothers owed their relative wealth to the black market. Molly marveled at their hoard of military rations, fuel, tents, medicines, weapons, and digging tools stolen from various UN armies, USAID, the Red Cross, and, she recognized, the RE-1 dig. There were enough provisions here for five expeditions.
With Samnang’s help, Duncan bargained the brothers down to what he called their “all-inclusive rate.” With fuel, the week of driving, supplies, and “equipment rental,” their fee came to four hundred and twenty dollars. Shouting back and forth, the brothers dashed around the courtyard with boxes and bags and jerry cans of fuel, loading the truck and wiping the dust from the seats for their passengers.
It was not quite eight-thirty as their little convoy crossed the bridge leading north.
Luke was waiting for them where he’d said, sitting on his haunches at the far side of the bridge in a globe of yellowing electric light. The bats were rampant here. Molly had seen them before, hanging from the highest branches like leathery fruit, but now they dove from the shadows, cutting swaths through the clouds of huge moths drawn to the lamp.
As they approached, he stood in their headlights and Molly noticed the dogs. There were twenty or thirty of them, skeletal orange and tan things, circling Luke, keeping their distance. Until Cambodia, she had never given two thoughts to the expression “dog eat dog.” Hungry enough, they really did. She had pictures of puppies being carried away in the jaws of mongrels, of a dog gnawing at a dog skull. Her shock had amused Kleat.
He stood without a wave or a greeting, holding not one thing in his hands, not even a cigarette. Under the road dirt, his skin gleamed in the headlights. The dog bites and thorn cuts on his shins had the plastic gloss of old scars.
For a moment, a terrible moment, Molly saw her mother in him, crazy as hell, ricocheting from the kindness and torment of strangers, lost to the world, surrounded by dogs. A chill shot through her. For all the smothering wet heat, goose bumps flared along her arms and legs.
The sight of him made Molly fear for herself as she had been long ago, for the half-forgotten infant in her mother’s arms. How many animals had circled them, too, waiting for a meal? How many lamplights had her mother sheltered beneath? The miracle of that baby’s survival flooded Molly, not with awe, but with terror.
Had flies billowed around the smell of breast milk on her mother’s blouse? Had truckers ejected the roadside Madonna and child when they caught a whiff of unchanged diapers? Molly had floated through a gauntlet of loathing and dangers that she could never precisely know. But the sight of this stranger, this walking suicide, threw her into a panic.
Molly’s hands went to her stomach, her womb, as it were, and felt the passport wallet hidden under her sundress. Inside it were her passport and money and one other thing, perhaps her most valuable possession, the driver’s license issued in 1967 to a teenage girl named Jane Drake. The image came to her, Molly’s same black hair, Molly’s same green eyes. Molly had three inches on her, and outweighed her by ten pounds, but they were still the same woman. She closed her eyes and drew up the sweet optimism on that face, and it was nothing like the harrowed madman in their headlights. Her alarm subsided.
She snapped a picture of Luke through the cracked windshield, mostly to return to herself. The big Mercedes pulled alongside. Kleat looked down from the cab. “What are we waiting for?” he said.
Molly was sitting in the front seat of the Land Cruiser. Luke took the backseat, next to Duncan. He was thin as a willow wand, but when he climbed in, the vehicle sagged under his weight. She thought the shocks must be worn out.
“Please fasten your seat belts and place your trays in an upright position,” Molly said to him. She was excited. A great discovery was about to unfold. Then she glanced back, and Luke’s face was joyless.
10.
Highway 7 lunged at them. No neat white lines. No mile markers. No speed limit. No warning signs. Speed was their only safe conduct, or so she gathered from the way their driver drove. They didn’t slow even when they passed through darkened villages or swerved for potholes Molly could not see.
She had never ridden at night in Cambodia, and so help her God never would again. To conserve their headlights, everyone drove with their lights off. Trucks, cars, buses, all hurtled at them from the darkness. Only at the very last instant would their lights spring on, then off, blowing her night vision, leaving her—and presumably their driver—more sightless than before.
The boy hunched in the darkness, like a reptile, his chest to the steering wheel, his forehead pressed to the glass. He was the youngest of the brothers, maybe nineteen or twenty, with wrists little thicker than the plastic steering wheel. Born and raised in refugee camps, they had come up through misery she could only imagine. He was wearing a blue-checkered
She wished Duncan would tell some of his jokes and stories, but he was mostly silent beside the stone lump of their guide. The boys weren’t having fun. It was a road trip, not a funeral. She tried to prime the pump. She handed out little Jolly Rancher cinnamon candies from her bag, offering one to the driver.
“His name is Vin,” said Duncan.
“Vin,” she said. The boy smiled.
“Heng Putheathvin,” Duncan amplified. “Among Khmers, the surname goes first, though it varies from child to child depending on the parents’ whim. It can get confusing. They might use the mother’s surname for one child, and the father’s for another. It’s like a gift they decide upon at birth. Sometimes the father will give his surname to a favorite child. Sometimes he gives it to a bad luck child just in order to protect him. Or her.”
“A bad luck child?”
“It’s a curious custom, a kind of fetal scapegoat. While the baby is still in the womb, he or she bears responsibility for any bad luck that lands on the family. Say a mother goes into labor and sends her son for the midwife, and along the way a dog bites the boy. The infant is held responsible. From then on, you’re marked. Everyone around knows you brought bad luck from the womb. But the father can help deflect it by giving you his family name.”
“That’s so unfair,” said Molly. “To blame an unborn child.”
“It’s that destiny thing,” Duncan said. He spoke to Vin in Khmer. The boy responded shyly. Duncan laughed. “I asked him, and Heng is their father’s name. He said he and his brothers are all bad luck children.”
“Ask him about his tattoos.”
Duncan and Vin went back and forth. Vin seemed quite proud.
“They’re called
“Jesus, man.” It was Luke, staring at Duncan in dismay. “You talk like a believer.”
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” Duncan said to him.
“And what’s this?” Molly asked, pointing at the most unusual marking. She’d seen it earlier. Duncan shined his light on Vin’s neck. At the upper tip of a series of welts lay a reddish image of George Washington.
“That,” said Duncan, “is an American quarter. In reverse.”
“He had a quarter tattooed on his neck?”
“Not tattooed. It’s folk medicine.
Duncan asked Vin a question. “He has a headache. One of his brothers gave him a good, hard session. The coin can get pretty hot. His brother pressed it on his neck, like a signature. George Washington was here.”
