In a cardboard box at the foot of her cot was a white bundle of fur, still as an ermine mitten. She put in her hand and lifted carefully. It was Sticky Rice, as limp as a hand puppet.
“He’s not quite dead,” she said. “I’m afraid he might have finally swallowed something that didn’t agree with him. We lose and gain dogs daily but this tyke has found a way into my heart. I don’t think I can bear to watch him die.”
The dams burst as I was carrying the cardboard box to the truck. I hated crying in daylight when everyone can witness my frailties. I put the last few hours of Sticky Rice on the passenger seat and drove like an imbecile into Lang Suan to see Dr. Somboon, the cow specialist.
An hour later I pulled up in front of Mair’s shop. She was in there with her haunting group. They were rearranging shelves and cleaning and throwing out ten-year-old stock. The cassette was playing something called ‘Spirit in the Sky’. It was one of Mair’s oldies but baddies, yet the local ladies were swinging their ample rears in time to the beat. They all seemed very happy. I walked around to the passenger side of the truck and collected my Leo Beer carton.
“What’s in the box?” I heard.
Granddad Jah was sitting under the canopy opposite waiting for traffic to watch. I carried my patient across the road and sat beside him.
“Almost dead dog,” I said.
“Planning on dressing it up, are you?”
That was as close to a joke as I’d heard from the lips of Granddad Jah in many a year and, if the taste was anything to go by, I’d be happy to wait many more for the next.
“Well, he’s not guaranteed death,” I said. I opened up the flaps to show him.
“You sure?”
“I took him to the vet. He didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. He seemed to think ninety percent of puppies in this area die a horrid death from intestinal parasites before they’re six months old. He had a sort of cocktail that worked wonders on calves, he said. He gave this little rag a shot of it, said he should really be on a saline drip but he didn’t have one and, even if he did, he confessed he had trouble finding veins any smaller than a garden hose. He gave me some antibiotics just in case the mite makes it through the afternoon.”
“Since when have you been a rescuer of dogs?”
“Granddad, this is Sticky Rice. He’s a hero. He solved the
“Fair enough.”
We sat for a while. It was a really bad day for traffic.
“Granddad Jah?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you see anything of Captain Waew?”
“Who?”
“The detective from Surat.”
“Oh, him. No.”
“You should invite him up. Hang out together.”
Granddad Jah stiffened. For a man who was already eighty percent bone, that took some doing.
“Why should I do that?”
“‘Cause you make such a good team.”
He half turned his head, looked at the box on my lap, then turned back.
“Don’t know what you mean,” he grunted.
“Stolen Milo van, wiped clean, naked gangster padlocked to a bench in a train station. ‘Deserved’ —
“You don’t think…?”
“Yes, I do. I imagine you were planning to get a confession out of him for the killing of the hippy couple. Then you found out — ”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then, in fear of his life, he told you it was his own daughter in that VW and that she was very much alive. I imagine you were really disappointed because you both knew what a seedy character he was.”
Granddad searched the horizon and the tops of the trees for traffic.
“Lucky you believed him,” I forged on, “‘cause I dread to think what you might have done to him otherwise. All you were left with was humiliation. So, I think you were lucky.”
A congealed blood-red pick-up truck with a black plastic fish-chest on the back plodded past at forty kilometers an hour, spitting out exhaust and causing its own force field of pollution. I stood up and waited for it to pass. The driver waved. I waved back. Everybody waved down here. I wouldn’t be surprised if husbands waved at their wives when they woke up in the mornings.
“Nice touch though,” I added. “Spelling my name wrong. ‘Jum’ indeed.”
He couldn’t hold back the smile.
“You’re wasted as a girl, Jimm Juree,” he said. “Wasted.”
I took the box down to the beach and wondered whether Sticky would prefer a land or sea burial. I opened the flaps so the sun could get in and looked for evidence of breath. It was scant. I gazed up at the swimming pool sky to see if there were vultures circling overhead. Gogo had picked up on the scent of death and followed me down to the water’s edge. It was true she’d eat anything but surely there were taboos, even for dogs. She stopped three meters away, turned eleven circles and lay on the hot sand with her backside pointed directly at my head.
“You’re a hard bitch to love,” I said.
“I hope you aren’t talking to me.”
Mair had followed me down to the beach. She had a tiny bottle of Yakult in her hand. I saluted a company that could convince half a country it couldn’t live without weak sugared milk and germs.
“No, Mair,” I said. “You’re an easy bitch to love.”
“What’s in the box?” she asked.
“Sticky Rice.”
“Oh, good. I bought some grilled chicken earlier.”
I tipped the box on its side.
“Non-digestible,” I told her.
“Oh, you poor baby,” she said, reaching into the carton and lifting the limp pup onto her lap. There was evidence of very unpleasant secretions on the newspaper he’d been lying on. Despite that, Mair held Sticky to her chest and cooed at him. There was a slight movement that could have been a postmortem muscle spasm, then a definite sigh. I imagined myself as a tiny infant nestled against that same breast, almost dead, blood and vomit in my cot. Who’d have babies?
Gogo predictably walked a wide arc around me and stood close to my mother, glaring at the patient.
“The ladies and I have been talking about setting up a cooperative of home-made produce,” she said. “It’s something I’d been thinking about for quite some time.”
“You had? Then why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you do it?”
“I was waiting.”
“What for?”
“For you all to decide you liked it here.”
“Wait! Who said I liked it?”
“You like it.”
I pointed out to Mair that something unpleasant was leaking down the front of her shirt but she smiled and nodded knowingly.
“And Arny seems happy too,” she said. “And even Father has his moments. I only wish we could convince Sissi to come down. We could be the happy family we used to be.”
I wasn’t sure we’d ever all been happy at the same time.
“I’m not sure Sissi would see the happy side of all this.”
Mair removed the soiled newspaper and put Sticky Rice back in his box.
“The poor fellow can sleep in your room tonight.”
