Free Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne

grass—and soon he saw people walking along a road, bicycles flashing in the sun.
    The pilot turned to him and said something, the name of a place perhaps, Prek Pnov, and he stood up and walked to the bow, which would touch land. There were long shelving banks of dirty wet grass and reeds, and above them a scrim of slum shacks made of tin. There were a few children with mechanical toy birds and fishing rods standing at the tip of a line of planks that led up from the water’s edge into the shanty. It was not quite the city but over the slum and the river soared a modern bridge which suggested its presence. The thick dust of the country roads hung above Prek Pnov, the dust which dries in an hour and then rises to envelop the head, and through it he could see the gold tints of a ramshackle wat covered with wooden scaffolding and high sad trees caked with cement powder.
    When the boat came to, Robert stepped onto the planks and looked down at the mysterious pilot, who seemed unconcerned. This was not a stop that any commercial boat would use; it must have been a secretive place that Simon used to get ashore while going about his equally secretive business.
    “Where’s Simon?” Robert asked again, but now more clearly and forcefully. “Where’s my bag?”
    The pilot smiled with a vast charm.
    He had already unmoored the boat again and the craft was moving away from the path of planks as suddenly as it had arrived. As it did so the children closed in on Robert and began to pester him.
One dolla, one dolla.
    “Oh, OK then,” Robert called after the pilot, “you dump me here and then you just leave like that? Just like that? What am I supposed to do now?”
    The pilot waved cheerfully. Nothing to be said or expressed, just the fact and the consequences that sprang from it.
    “Come back,” Robert shouted after him, waving too, but not in the same friendly way. “Come back right now!”
    He knew already that no such thing could happen. The men in the cluster of longtails below him stared and slowly their ironic smiles gained traction in Robert’s mind and he desisted. “Damn and fuck it,” he muttered and brushed past the children and began to climb the precarious gangplank through slopes of colorless plastic trash. The planks snaked through shacks on stilts, up into the shadow and heat of a single alley that wound its way through the slum.
    He was just at a loss, and aboard the boat he had not been able to think anything through. He moved as an automaton until he was clear of the river and he thought wildly, in great leaps: go back up the river by car and find the house again or press on and see what happened. But there was no sense in going back, he knew there was nothing behind him and, far more importantly, he didn’t want to go back. Secretly, he was thrilled. From now on he could tell himself that he was a victim of circumstance.
    He laughed and the people out on the alley sitting around with their lunch saw it and laughed along immediately. It was the Khmer way. Their surprise was not melodramatic. It came out in that subdued collective laughing. He was in an alley filled with little shops and two-story houses where the balconies were crowded with makeshift altars of bowls of fruit and decorative piles of beer cans. Great round earthenware urns stood outside the doors. As he turned and decided to walk to the right, his head narrowly missed a line of tiny fish impaled on a wooden pin that dangled from an awning rod. The children burst into laughter. He ducked and laughed along and moved awkwardly toward the cheap gold
chedi
of the temple which he could see over the roofs.
    The wat looked like a half-abandoned construction site. But there were gold guardian lions erect and snarling in the sun and
chedi
which had been restored. The
naga
heads on the stairs had been repainted gold and green and there were smaller lions posted on the roofs. He walked in, seeing nobody and now no longer followed by the children,