Free God's Fool by Mark Slouka Page B

their wares for a profit and saw no reason why we couldn’t do the same. People would be curious about us, my brother claimed, and give us their business. I agreed. And so, by slow degrees, we began to learn the delicate art of selling ourselves.
    It was just as my brother had said it would be. Curious to see the double boys, people crowded around our boat. And we obliged them,clowning for some, remaining stoic with others, helpfully pulling up our shirts (but not so often as to cheapen the effect), making them pay for their sympathy with baht, their revulsion with baht, their staring eyes and open mouths with baht. Soon we were saving a respectable amount every week. Returning home, we would give our mother the small sum we had made and she would take it, as she had once taken the money our father made, and add it to the small pile hidden beneath the floorboard in the bedroom.
    The credit, I’ll readily admit, was my brother’s. Shrewd as Poor Richard, he sensed our value long before I did, and nurtured it well; years later, he would bargain our fees in New York with Barnum as coldly, as successfully, as he had once bargained for embroidered cloth or wooden bowls in the floating market in Meklong. But his, too, was the blame. More flexible than his stupid brother, he gave away too much, bent to the needs of others too easily, resisted the staring world and its dollars and pounds too little.
    I didn’t know this at the time. I worked alongside him. I smiled and clowned and turned handstands on the deck, and when faced with a stubborn customer, would pretend to be jerked just slightly off balance by my brother’s movements, so as to bring her attention back to our plight. Because of our condition, the government classed us with cripples and idiots and charged us no tax; I accepted this as our due, and happily pocketed the profit.
    We traded on the Meklong for three years, tying up our boat in the evenings with the other merchants, listening to them talk about women and war as they ate from their bowls in the evenings, sleeping lightly to protect our wares from thieves. In the morning the creak of wood and the sound of ropes uncoiling would wake us in the dark and we would be off, poling in the warm rain as the jungle slowly appeared around us; though no more than boys, together we almost made a man.
    Five years had passed since the cholera came to Meklong. My brother had saved us. Long before the death of King Rama II, we were no longer hungry.

III.
    The facts are these: Robert Hunter never found us, never discovered us, never rescued us, as he liked to claim for the benefit of those fresh-faced newspapermen who clustered around him, eager for our story, and who kept his ever-hungry purse well fed and fat. We found him that steaming afternoon in 1824, stumbling along the bank of the Meklong like some exotic fool, his face like a sundial and his skin as damp and freckled and pale as a flower.
    The descendant of a British merchant ignominiously kicked out of Virginia after the Revolutionary War, Hunter had ground ashore in Muang Tai. Hardheaded and arrogant beneath his dour Scots reserve, he could be persuasive, even charming when he wanted to be. In no time at all he had acquired a warehouse across the river from Bangkok, established contacts in the Royal Palace, and begun scouring the countryside for goods and artifacts with which he hoped to resuscitate his flagging export business.
    We would be his finest export, his salvation, his passage from the obscurity to which his fate and his talents had consigned him.
    We were thirteen years old. We had gone for a swim in the river that afternoon and were climbing back on board our boat when we heard someone call and turned just in time to see a tall dark figure, hurrying toward us down the bank, catch his toe on a root and pitch forward intothe grass. It was his manner of falling—as though someone had nailed his feet to the earth and at the same time given him a violent