war dance. When Sticky comes across the unexpected, he eats it. But it was obviously too big to eat because he was doing the forward-backward tango and barking the hell out of it. As I got closer, I thought a rubber mask had been washed up on the tide. A face stared at me with one of those frightening Hallowe'en expressions. I decided it would be a lot of fun to take it back to the resort and scare the daylights out of my little brother. I even got close enough to reach down to pick it up. And then I realized.
My 'sister' and I have it in mind to one day become wealthy by writing screenplays for movies. A couple of months earlier I'd sent off treatments to our hero Clint Eastwood in Carmel, California. He has a movie company called Malpaso Productions. They unequivocally
My first reaction on seeing a decapitated head on the beach should have been 'Oh, my God. [Scream optional as there was nobody around to hear it.] How awful,' etc. Whereas, in fact, the opening scene of a movie flashed into my mind.
EXT-COCONUT BEACH-EARLY MORNING
A beautiful Asian girl is jogging along a pristine white sand beach with Tin Tin her golden retriever at her side. The sweat causes her flimsy T-shirt to cling to her pert breasts offering a suggestion of nipples. Not so obvious as to alienate the censor early on, but enough to pull in half a million horny teenage boys once they've seen the trailer. She stumbles over a severed head on the sand…
It needed work. I mean she'd have to be blind not to notice a head on a pristine beach. Perhaps I could make Tin Tin a guide dog. But the point was…the head had set off my imagination long before it occurred to me I should have been repulsed by it. I hoped with all my tiny little heart that this was a psychological defense mechanism. That my subconscious was blanking out the horror of my discovery and replacing it with a screenplay. All being well, I'd burst into tears and be inconsolable later.
I studied him. Head. Male. Thirties. Maybe younger without the wave-buffeting and salt water puckering. Two earrings on his left ear. Long hair wrapped around him like seaweed. A 'No! For God's sake, don't do it' expression on his waxy face. Propped against a shoe. It's astounding, but our beach is a single-shoe repository. A lot of one- legged people come to Maprao to supplement their shoe supplies. Our head leaned against a pale green platform clog at such an angle as to suggest a possibility-a vague and distant possibility-that the rest of the body was buried at attention beneath it like a Chinese terracotta warrior. Given the number of years it had taken to inter a terracotta warrior, I rather doubted it, but a good investi-gative journalist didn't leave anything to chance. I poked it with a stick.
It was a mistake on a number of levels because the head spun around to stare glassily straight into my face. The mouth dropped a fraction, as if to begin a speech, and a crab walked out. My heart took refuge behind my sternum for a brief moment. Sensing my distress, Sticky jumped in to protect me. He grabbed our head by the nose and started to shake it. It was very brave of him, and I'd like to believe he was acting as my bodyguard rather than merely starting breakfast early. But when Grandad Jah accompanied me to the beach twenty minutes later, that was the reason our head was covered with a plastic laundry basket with a rock on top of it. I called it the preservation of evidence. I removed the basket and took photographs of the head from several angles with my cell phone while Grandad sat cross-legged on the beach.
'You think he was attacked by a shark?' I asked.
I often plied Grandad with theories I already knew the answers to. It made him feel superior and got his creative juices flowing. It might seem odd that I should consult a traffic cop on matters related to head severance, but deep down Grandad had been a real policeman in the Western sense. He would probably have been a great detective if only he'd allowed himself to accept the odd bribe every now and then. Corruption was a necessary stepping stone along the pathway to promotion in the Thai police force. How could anybody have faith in an honest policeman? None of his colleagues could trust him. There's probably some whistle-blower joke I could put in here, but I really have to keep track of the story. All I need to say is that after forty years in the force, he had reached the humble rank of corporal and, without those odd baksheesh bonuses, pretty much survived from the proceeds from our family shop in Chiang Mai. If only he'd dived into the slush I know he could have been somebody. He had a marvelous policeman's instinct.
'No,' he said.
On the negative side, getting words out of him was like waiting for a whale to give birth.
'No what?'
'Unless the shark was carrying a saber'-he took time out to sigh at my ignorance-'this had nothing to do with sea creatures.'
I admit the neck wound was very neat, but I knew first impressions could be deceptive. I suppose I still had in mind the foreigner a few months earlier who'd put a plastic bag over his head, tied a rope around his neck, and jumped off a bridge. The noose had snared and the body had snapped clean off and continued down into the river. All that remained was a head in a plastic bag at the end of a rope. For weeks the police believed it was a Mafia revenge killing. But the pathologist confirmed it was all due to gravity. Heads are obviously not as well connected as we'd like to believe.
'Why's that?' I asked.
He gave me the look.
'Think, Jimm, think. First, in spite of what the Thai cinema would have us believe, there aren't really that many creatures in the sea that rip people apart for the hell of it. Sharks are the most feared deep-sea psychopaths, but they are actually a rather maligned creature. In fact, they would prefer to hoover up plankton rather than go to the trouble of chewing on human gristle. If we don't bother them, they don't eat us. Simple as that. There's more likelihood of being hit on the head by a bullet fired into the air during a celebration than there is of being attacked by a shark. Second, the tissue and vertebrae of the neck is especially tough. A sea creature would have to shake and gnaw to get through it. There is no bruising here. This was a clean single cut performed by a skilled swordsman.'
'So how do you think our friend here wound up on the beach without his body?' I asked.
Grandad shimmied across the sand and, to my amazement, picked up the head and turned it over, like an antique dealer looking for a manufacture date.
'Sharp knife?' he said. 'Machete? Sword? Don't know. I wasn't a forensic scientist. I directed traffic.'
I switched my cell phone to CALL mode and started to search for a number.
'Who are you calling?' he asked.
'Police.'
He always assumed this lemony expression whenever I mentioned the police.
'Just go and tell Headman Beung,' he said.
It turned out there was a protocol after all, and who better to deal with heads than the head man? I learned later that bodies and parts thereof washed up on the beach was not an unusual phenomenon. There were regulations about it posted on the clubhouse wall at the trawlermen's recreation facility. A surprising number of fishermen couldn't swim, and an even higher number imbibed stimulants of various kinds to stay awake through the night. A quart of Red Bull might just convince a man he was a dolphin. On the Gulf here, you'd need to get those images of eight-meter waves washing over the deck of pirate ships out of your mind. Three meters was our perfect storm, and you could roll over that in a rubber inner tube quite safely. We aren't ever going to see a tidal wave on
