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The Mongoose William Doreski
Near the Laotian border villages cling to the hillsides like barnacles to a ship. I occupy an entire hut and lie down nightly with ghosts that rustle and pant and toss till dawn. My neighbor speaks French and went to college in Marseilles, though she has no nationality, and settled here after the war. She keeps a mongoose. Every day its bright pink mouth bedevils me, its rage for play so terrific it sometimes trees me, sometimes wrestles my leg like a cobra, its gaudy prey. My neighbor thinks her pet cute. So do I, when it isn't hacking chunks of meat from my calf or digging mine shafts in my garden. One day the government patrol arrives to check our papers. Foreigners remain suspect in Vietnam, and the current government lacks friends among the Western powers. The soldiers, though, are polite, and stamp our papers, shake hands, and leave. One of them has disappeared, but their lieutenant's unconcerned. "A local girlfriend. He'll catch up," the officer explains in formal, literary Vietnamese. But he's wrong. In my garden I find the mongoose kicking dirt on a corpse. It tore out the soldier's throat and nearly decapitated him. Now my neighbor and I must bury the dead man so carefully that even if they search with dogs the soldiers won't find him. My neighbor looks pleased. "I trained my pet to kill whatever comes in uniform," she says. We dig a hole six inches deep, or so, wrap the stiff in plastic, and sink him under a layer of fragrant bark and mulch. Bemused, the mongoose watches this process, and when the hole's filled nuzzles me with brotherly regard. My neighbor kisses my cheek and takes her pet home to a damp hut like mine. Exhausted, I lie down with ghosts now more plentiful by one, and feel the mountains grind all night as the good earth digests us. |
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