Suspicious Minds

Dreams are funny things at my age. You never know if they stem from something you saw, something you thought, something you did, something you were told in a myriad of lifetime encounters or even something you once read or watched on a television or smart phone. Maybe they are a mix of it all.

Last night I had a dream…

*****

We were driving in a tiny truck with me sat on a bench in the back and the driver in the cab, which no longer had a rear window. He was one of those grey haired men with a slight grey unshaven growth on his face, chain smoking and occasionally shouting something for me to hear above the din of other vehicles, passer bys, the English music the driver had lightly playing in his cab from what he had told me was his tape for foreign passengers, and the ubiquitous people with hats cycling by and coming towards us from all directions. He lit another cigarette as I sat in the back alone enjoying nobody else crammed in, with head bent down a little from the low roof, looking out of the open sides.

It was just after the revolution – a few weeks, a few months, I don’t remember. Life, however, was definitely coming back with those passing us have a handful of vegetables or fruit in their woven bags, or bicycle baskets. People always recover, I thought. And a dawn of occasional weak smiles is breaking through from the other grim faces. The buildings and roads still show scars of the fighting – a collapsed or partially collapsed half wood, half cement house, dark stains on some walls from heat or could it sometimes be blood. It was a small large town, but not the capital and why I was there, I wondered about.

Gradually we moved slowly through the crowds and mix of vehicles towards the town centre. It was hot as a light rain fell but sun was still brightly blazing down on everything with not even the hint of a rainbow. As we entered the town, we passed a small market that seemed to have nothing but cassette tapes, music tapes, small coverings on the floor with a few cassettes on or random boxes overflowing with cassettes, some with long streams of brown tapes running from them, some with faded side stickers and some even in cracked and scratched cassette covers. A myriad of people thronged around the market looking carefully at cassettes.

“Looking for classic or popular local music,” I thought.

But as we moved towards the centre of the town the scars of fighting took a darker tone too. Small wooden or barely painted two or three story rickety hotels with verandahs came into view. But those verandahs were often partially or even totally collapsed or burned or scarred with pieces missing – pieces of roofing, pieces of flooring or side supports for the roofing that protected those on them from the sun or rain, or both. Pieces of roof half fallen down often still having one end now occupy part of the verandah while the other end was still attached to a piece of the roofing further along.

“Didn’t they used to place bombs close to the verandahs to target the soldiers?” I asked my driver as he lit another cigarette and slowly meandered the truck through the ever denser crowds of people, crowds of bicycles with now ringing bells on the handlebars and baskets at the front, and occasional two-stroke motorcycles and even fewer cars and other trucks like our taking who knows who somewhere.

“That was Phompat. He was allied with the revolutionaries back then, but they were too savvy to invite him to government when they won. He and his group used to place bombs on bicycles, any debris close by or occasionally in a delivery truck to target the government soldiers as they relaxed on verandahs in the cool evening breezes drinking iced drinks or cold beer or sometimes local whisky mixed with soda and ice. With them would sit their paramours or local girls wanting a drink or money and around the verandahs would throng vendors on foot and bicycle trying to sell anything they could to the soldiers and those with them – a piece of dried squid, a bag of spice meat, a bottle of nail varnish, even sometimes a dress, things like that. Then bang, the bomb would explode and dead and injured soldiers, paramours, girls and vendors would litter the street as the red blood ran into the road sometimes mixing with the rain or poured away oil in the gutters.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“He has gone now. One day after the fighting, he was sitting on a verandah drinking whisky with some of his men, when a single bullet hit him, in the mouth and then took the back of his head off. You can still see the stains on the hotel it happened at.”

“I guess he had a lot of enemies.”

“Back then in the first few days and even weeks after fighting ended, people were still scared and carried a knife, or small gun, just in case, and some even carried an old AK47. That has gone now. People are more confident. Some people, around on that day, say they saw an old man with grey hair and a rough unshaven craggy face, chain smoking as so many do, who carried an Ak47 fall to the ground after finishing a cigarette. They rushed to see if he was alright, but as they got close, they noticed he was prone like a fighter with the gun pointed in front of him, and a single shot rang out. The raised him to his feet and checked he was OK as he brushed the soil of the road from his old well worn clothes and said something about falling over and being sorry. Then he just disappeared into the crowd and was gone.”

He continued as I sat wondering.

“They say he was the father or grandfather or some paramour, young girl or vendor who was blown up by Phompat’s bombs. And so, we have another hero in the town and as the story spreads maybe the region or even the country. An old truck, pretty much like this one came and picked up the remains of Phompat and the hotel cleaners scarped and swept bits of bone and flesh into the gutter to be washed away by the rains, before making a slight and quickly abandoned attempt to clear the stains with a wet mop. And the revolutionaries, by then the government, were savvy as they knew a word or words would add to the story. They said and did nothing as the story of Phompat leaving us disappeared quicker than the bullet smashed its way through his false teeth.”

And while the driver was telling me this story, I noticed that from the old cassette player with wires hanging from it can the sound of the Fine Young Cannibals singing Suspicious Minds.