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“Go, now,” the old man said. “We are in time, your friends have not yet been executed. Get as close to the entranceway as you can. When the moment is at hand, seize it. Do not spend time watching me.”
“What are you going to do?”
He looked at me, and over my shoulder, and miles past me. Perhaps he was seeing a parade in the Place de la Concorde.
“I shall do what I must,” he said.
“But-”
“It is time.” A smile. “The day of glory has arrived. Do not ask questions, young friend. Go now. The day of glory has arrived.”
I put both hands on the table top and pushed myself to my feet. The day of glory has arrived, I told myself. My knees buckled. I took a deep breath and walked unsteadily to the doorway. My little waitress blinked good-bye. I stepped out into the heat of the glaring afternoon sun, waited for a moment to get my bearings, then found my way quickly to the command headquarters.
The four heads stared at me as before, but this time they had no effect upon me. Perhaps I was prepared; perhaps the fever and the betel nut had combined to render me impervious to horror. I looked at the heads, and they looked back, and I walked past them to the side of the entranceway, where notices were posted on a bulletin board. Some were hand-lettered, others were printed, and all of them were equally meaningless to me. I can speak Khmer but ca
I slipped my hand under my tunic and touched the handle of the dagger. Its presence was somehow reassuring. I looked at the squat concrete building. If we left it by its rear door, we would have to run off to the right to the street the old man had indicated, then turn to the left and follow that street to the river, then look off to the left some fifty paces for the boat. I pictured his finger tracing the route on the table top and I closed my eyes and fixed the image of his map in my mind.
In the street a jeep made its way through the crowd. The driver confirmed the popular notion of the Oriental view that human life is cheap, driving with a fine disdain for the throngs in front of him. Magically the crowd melted aside just in time to let him pull to a stop in front of the building. The driver remained in the car. Two men climbed out of the back seat. One of them was middle-aged and looked important. The other younger and in a less impressive uniform, hurried to open the door for him. The guards stood aside, and the two men walked on into command headquarters.
Wonderful, I thought. By the time I made my move, half the soldiers in Laos would be inside the concrete structure. I looked around, wondering what the old man had pla
I chewed a fresh piece of betel and spat a stream of red juice at the dusty ground. The sun burned down. The deluge of the night before was barely a memory, and what had been mud a few hours ago was now baked as hard as earthenware. I chewed and spat and, like the mindless crowd, I waited for something to happen.
Then something happened.
I didn’t even recognize the old man at first, but I stared at him anyhow, just like everyone else. He was a sight. He was riding in my cart, and my bullock was pulling it, and all of that was normal enough, but that was where normalcy stopped. For the bullock was moving faster than it had ever moved in its life, faster, I suspect, than any bullock had ever moved since the species first evolved. The bullock tore through the crowd like a bull at Pamplona, tossing its head and snorting, bouncing the little cart on the bumpy roadway, while the old man prodded its rump with fire.
I do not speak metaphorically. The old colonial boy held a long stick like a shepherd’s crook, and on the end of that stick was a rag soaked in kerosene or something of the sort, and the rag was burning. He kept poking the flaming end of the stick into the tormented end of the bullock, and the results were spectacular.
All hell broke loose. The crowd stampeded. The jeep parked in front happened to be in the way, and the bullock came down on its hood and struck a mighty blow against the forces of automation. The animal caromed off the wrecked vehicle, tossed its head wildly, then charged for a mass of onlookers. They broke and ran; some of them got away and some of them did not.
The guards didn’t know what to do. They had drawn their guns and were now waving them uncertainly in the air, evidently feeling that the situation could be solved only by a show of force but not knowing where the force ought to be directed. And through it all the old man prepared for his finest hour. The day of glory has arrived –
He was in costume, for one thing. He wore the uniform of a French Legionaire. God knows where he found it; perhaps he had kept it hidden as a relic of better times. It fit him like a glove on a pencil. The pants covered his feet and the jacket’s sleeves came down well over his hands, and the shriveled little old man inside disappeared completely. He paused, kept the fire away from the bullock’s rear for a moment, and his little voice rang out over the crowd.
“Long live King Charles de Gaulle! Long live the beautiful France! Lafayette is here! Long live Napoleon! To hell with Marx! To hell with Lenin! To hell with the Pathet Lao! To hell with Mao Tse-tung! Long live Jea
Everyone’s attention was drawn to him. The doors to the command post were open, and soldiers from within crowded the doorway, staring out at the wild old man with the wild young bullock. I could have pushed through them without their paying the slightest bit of attention to me, but at the moment I was utterly transfixed by his display. Wild bullocks couldn’t have moved me.
“‘Allons, enfants de la patrie – ’”
Singing the “Marseillaise” at the top of his lungs, he began waving a tin can around madly. He splashed something from it, soaking the straw around him, soaking the fine French Legion uniform, soaking the flanks of the unfortunate bullock.
Then, still singing bravely, he brought the day of glory to its peak. He touched his torch to the straw beneath his feet. And, as the straw and the cart and the bullock and the old man burst suddenly into flame, with the maddened bullock veering sharply to his right and crashing head-on into a cluster of ramshackle wooden huts, with bullets flying overhead, and with the final death-echoes of the French national anthem sounding around me, I drew my dagger and rushed into the building.