The visitors parade toward the altar through the mazy pergola of spreading limbs, chanting in Pali. Their arms are full of joss sticks, stackable lunch tins filled with gang gai, and garlands of lotus blossom and jasmine. Three little children run ahead, singing a lûk thûng song as fast as their lips can move.
They draw near the shrine. They add their garlands to the rainbow of offerings already spidering across the branches. Then the sky falls and a missile crashes into the foliage above. Joss sticks, garlands, and lunch tins scatter at the impact. The shock knocks two pilgrims to the ground.
Chaos clears. The pilgrims look up. A giant farang hangs above their head, threatening to crash through the branches and fall the last short stretch to the ground. They call up to the foreigner. He doesn’t respond. A debate begins on how to reach the man and cut him loose from the stranglehold of fig and parachute. Technical Sergeant Pavlicek wakes to several Thais standing on benches and prodding him. He thinks he’s lying on his back, bobbing in a pool of atmosphere, while inverted people lean down and snatch at him from under the mirror surface. The pain from his leg and face crushes him. He coughs up a trickle of red spittle. He thinks: I’m dead.
No, a voice near his face corrects. Tree saved your life.
The three most useful syllables from his four years in Thailand bubble out of Douggie’s mouth. “Mâi kâo chai.” I don’t understand. With that, he blacks out again and resumes the long, cyclic task of falling. This time, he keeps on tumbling as the Earth beneath him opens wide and takes him in. He falls deep underground, a long, luxurious drop into the kingdom of roots. He plunges beneath the water table, downward toward the beginning of time, into the lair of a fantastic creature whose existence he never imagined.
THE LOCAL CLINIC won’t touch the leg of an American soldier. A staffer drives him to Khorat in a coral-colored Mazda with a Buddhist Wheel flag flying from its antenna. The car sounds like a choking khlong boat and trails a similar cloud of oily fumes in its wake. Pavlicek, drugged to the gills in the back seat, watches the green kilometers slide past. The low, lush landscape, the rolling hills. In the waters there are fish; in the fields, there is rice. The entire region will sink like a banana-leaf boat in a typhoon. Charlie will be sunning himself at the Siam Intercontinental, this time next year. A tree saved his life. It makes no sense.
When the injection from the clinic begins to wear off, Pavlicek begs the driver to kill him. The driver waves fingers around his mouth. “No Angrit.”
Douglas’s shinbone is cored. A doctor at the base in Khorat patches him up and ships him to Fifth Field, Bangkok. All his crewmates have survived—thanks in large part, the after-battle report says, to him. And he—he owes his own life to a tree.
. . .
THE AIR FORCE has no use for gimps. They give him crutches, an Air Force Cross—second highest medal for valor they hand out—and a free ticket back to SFO. He gets thirty-five bucks for the medal at Friendly’s Pawn on Mission. He’s not sure whether Friendly is helping a wounded vet or ripping him off blind. Nor does he much need to know. So ends loadmaster Douglas Pavlicek’s efforts to help preserve the free world.
The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below. Now and then words come trickling up the trunk for Douglas, like he’s still hanging upside down in the air: Tree saved your life. They neglect to tell him why.
LIFE COUNTS DOWN. Nine years, six jobs, two aborted love affairs, three state license plates, two and a half tons of adequate beer, and one recurring nightmare. With another fall ending and winter coming on, Douglas Pavlicek fetches the ball-peen hammer and smashes a row of potholes into the somewhat surfaced road that runs past the horse ranch and down toward Blackfoot. The goal is to slow people down so he can stand by the fence and see their faces a little. Come November, it may be some time before he’ll have that pleasure again.
Douglas makes a Saturday of it, after the horses have been fed and read to. The scheme works. If the car slows down enough, he and the dog jog alongside until the driver either opens the window to say