TURTLE
by Ronald Sparling
Turtle awoke to muffled moans from behind the thatched wall that created a barrier between the bedroom he shared with his grandmother and that of his mother. He rolled silently onto his stomach and raised himself to his hands and knees. Crept off the worn rattan mat that was his bed and across the finely swept dirt to a space in the wall where two sheets of bamboo met. Peeked through the gap between the tattered edges of the bamboo but what he saw he didn’t understand. Not really, even though he’d seen it many times before. But he was happy to see that this time it was not his mother making the noises, her face wincing with deadened acceptance.
This time, they came from a farang uncle, one of the foreign visitors who would bring his mother home late in the night, long after the birds had nestled into their perches, long after the cicadas had ceased their love calls and the painted eyes on the river boats could no longer see and the crews had cast their mooring lines and attached them to the roots of the mangroves that guarded the river bank. They came from the farang uncle whose pale dimpled body slapped away at his mother’s backside making sounds like waves on the river from passing cargo boats slapping against the mud river banks. The farang’s breathing was heavy and reluctant like that of men doing heavy labour or dying.
Turtle’s mother’s head suddenly swivelled towards him and her eyes met his. Her face scrunched up tight as she scowled her displeasure with Turtle and motioned with her head that he was to return to his bed.
In the morning Turtle squatted outside the open doorway of their hut, his feet bare and flat on the dirt, his toes curling and uncurling creating small depressions in the hard-packed dirt, as if to say “I was here.”
He knew the holes would anger his mother if she saw them before his grandmother had a chance to sweep them flat with the straw broom she used to keep the hut and their yard clear and smooth. His grandmother, Turtle knew, would not say a word, either to his mother nor to him, but would sigh with heavy resignation loud enough for Turtle to hear, playing the not-so-silent martyr.
The man who had been with his mother came out through the open doorway and paused beside Turtle, peering down the path toward the river and the city beyond using his hands to shield his eyes from the early morning sun that slanted beneath the palms. In the distance the city was still all greyness and shadows and without definition.
“How ya doing, mate?” the man asked without looking down.
Turtle made no reply. Only understood the question because he’d heard it so many times before. But the reality was, Turtle spoke little English.
The man glanced at his watch, then lowered his eyes to Turtle who immediately lowered his gaze to the dirt before him. The man said something about a taxi, plugged one nostril and blew hard to clear the other, then slowly made his way out of the yard and down the path that led to the small lane that skirted the river. Turtle watched the man until he reached the river’s edge, soi dogs barking and snarling at him, pretending to nip at his heels but too timid to get close enough for the man to even bother to react, always glancing back over their shoulders to see if they had back-up. He watched the man until he disappeared to the right toward the bridge that crossed into Bangkok.
If Turtle’s mother was feeling well, she would head into the city most evenings with some of the women from the surrounding huts, wearing their cut-off shorts or mini-skirts, laughing as they tottered along the uneven path on unfamiliar high heels. If she was feeling well, Turtles mother would head into the city and return in the early morning hours as the sun rose over the river. In the city Turtle knew she would meet farang men who would pay to be with her. Turtle didn’t like that his mother went into the city so often to meet these men, but hated the nights she went into the city and met no one even more. On those nights she would return home very drunk on Songsam or Hong Tong rum and would stumble around the hut swearing about those fucking farang until she fell asleep sobbing softly about her life and the village she’d left behind to earn a living in the only way she knew how.
When she did meet someone, sometimes they would come home with her for one night. These men were usually too drunk to walk down the dark path that led from where the taxi would drop them to their hut without his mother’s shoulder to lean on. And sometimes they would both be drunk and unsteady and Turtle would peer from the dark of the hut and watch them lurch along the path talking in loud attempted whispers and laughing loudly before his mother would try to quiet her new friend. Turtle would then scramble into his room before they would see him.
But there were others. Others who brought his mother home early in the evening and waited in a taxi or climbed out to have a smoke while his mother stuffed some belongings into her small travel bag, the one covered in plastic flower stickers. Turtle would drift toward these uncles sneaking quick glimpses as he pretended to be absorbed in his examination of the earth and its tiny secret inhabitants.
Once an uncle joined him, came to look at the scorpion Turtle was watching cross the path from the hut to the dirt road where the taxi sat. The man was big and hairy, except on top where his head shone in the late afternoon sun. He squatted next to Turtle, his large hairy legs poking out from beneath his beach shorts, one touching lightly against Turtle’s, his large arms, covered in dark, matted hair like a monkey’s, crossed on his knees. He spoke but the words were not in the vocabulary that Turtle’s mother had taught him so far. When the man stood, his Chang beer shirt without sleeves made him look like the wrestlers Turtle had seen on the television at the food stall where his mother sometimes took him for khao mun gai, the steamed chicken with rice that Turtle told his mother was his favourite. But mostly Turtle just wanted to go to that food stall for the television which hung high on the wall well out of the reach of customers and drunks.
The man had lifted one foot and brought his Nike runner down quickly on top of the scorpion. Turtle could hear the crunch of its small black exoskeleton. The man then smiled at Turtle and nodded his head as if they’d agreed that the scorpion had had to die.
Sometimes Turtle was curious to know if he’d seen the men before, but usually it was too difficult to tell. They all looked the same: tall and white. Most were very hairy except on the top of their heads. These men would sometimes smile at him and nod. Some even tried to speak Thai to him, ask him how he was. Sa ba di mai? they would mumble in mangled accents. Turtle never answered. Continued to inspect the ground and steal looks in their direction, while they looked at Turtle with a mixture of curiousity and guilt until they would finally turn away uncomfortable and impatient. Call to his mother and stand by the open door of the taxi. These men took his mother across the river back into the city where, his mother told him, they would stay in a room high up in the sky in a hotel somewhere near the heart of Bangkok. They would send his mother back in a taxi several days later alone, but with her purse full of money and carrying bags of food for grandmother to cook and a treat for Turtle.
Once his mother brought him a box of chocolate candies in the shape of turtles and she had made a big show of biting the head off one and then grabbed him around the waist pretending she was trying to do the same to him and they’d laughed until they’d rolled on the ground gripping each other with tears in their eyes.
Sometimes men took his mother away for a week or 10 days and she would come back with stories of blue oceans and white sandy beaches covered in farangs like ants on an ant hill. And so hairy, she would laugh. My little Turtle, you have never seen so many hairy farang in one place. It’s like they have come from the trees and only just lost their tails. The times these men visited were Turtle’s favourite because his mother always brought back a present for him when she returned.
One time she brought him a t-shirt with the name of the island she been to and a pretty picture of a palm tree on a beach leaning out over the ocean. Another time she brought him a toy boat, also with the name of an island on it, but it floated on an angle and then sank with little enthusiasm and the brown river current had swept it quickly out of sight. Turtles favourite gift so far had been a model plane with the airline’s logo on each side. Turtle had never been in a plane. Had only seen them cross over the sky, a silver glint leaving a trail of white behind.
But some, his mother would tell him, were boyfriends; they always came at the same time of the year and always for a week or two. Some stayed even for longer, but never more than one month. If these men came to their hut his mother would warn Turtle to be very quiet. Uncle has no children of his own, she would tell him, and doesn’t understand them. He is farang. Farang not same like Thai people. Not like children like Thai people. Farang no understand Thai way.
When his mother went away his grandmother, who spoke very little but communicated all of her displeasures very clearly, took care of Turtle. When his mother was away his grandmother would move her sleeping mat from their tiny room at the back of the hut where she remained hidden when Turtle’s mother had a visitor. She would move her mat to the front room where she squatted next to the small clay oven they used for cooking and made their simple meals of rice and bok choy, the Chinese cabbage she would stir fry with garlic and onion, and where she would then sleep with her cats.
But for all the times his mother had disappeared, this time was different and Turtle knew it. His mother had been gone eight weeks without a word and his grandmother was nice to him all the time but Turtle caught her looking at him with pity in her eyes. Each morning after their breakfast of jok, a simple rice soup to which, on special days, his grandmother would add an egg, Turtle would walk the path to the edge of the river and gaze across to the city, wondering which part of the city had swallowed his mother whole like a giant python. Turtle knew of one giant python that had dropped from above on one of his neighbours late at night in the dark of his outhouse. He’d been found crushed in the python’s coils, half-swallowed, the greedy python’s muscles still working in vain to take the body further inside.
Turtle would walk to the end of the path, past the rusted skeletons of Honda Cubs, upon the backs of which an entire country had been built, lying half-hidden in the brush with the village refuse of plastic bags and bottles and threadbare tires. Past the grave for spirit houses that had been home to malevolent and angry spirits of relatives long gone. Past the scrawny chickens and cows with the ribs showing through that mingled with men sitting red-faced from drinking. The men sat drinking while their girlfriends and wives worked dead-end jobs across the river near the ferry quay selling fried insects they would never eat themselves to barrel-chested backpackers in flip flops proving their love of adventure by trying local delicacies. Or the men sat drinking while their girlfriends and wives crossed the bridge with Turtle’s mother.
Turtle would walk to the river’s edge and then squat on the bank and gaze across to the city. He watched the cranes as they swung to and fro silently across the city skyline. And he listened to the sounds of the cars and trucks crossing the bridge to the east of his hut. They, like the planes, left trails behind them to mark their routes, but theirs were thick and black and looked to Turtle to be made of coal. And he watched the monitor lizards as they tried to waddle by at the river’s edge or swim silently past with only their heads showing above water. Turtle was wary of the monitors. He knew unless surprised or cornered, they would never attack. But he also knew that a bite from a surprised lizard would mean, at the very least, the loss of a limb. Turtle had heard of those who had died from a monitor’s bite, their bodies unable to defeat the infection, their families unable to afford the medicine needed. And he followed the progress of the river’s current as it pushed along the remains of dogs and cats and the occasional bloated body of a pig, animals that had fallen in where they could not get out, or had simply wasted away at the river’s edge, their carcasses waiting to be carried away by the river when the next tide came in.
And he waited patiently afraid he would spot a familiar shape float by.