But now he was transformed. He was sweaty, and his limbs — he was standing up — trembled. Martiya heard strange sounds coming from his throat, nothing like the gentle voice of the man she had met just recently. He made odd barking noises, and then again, that full-throated howl which had awakened and terrified her. It was as if a larger, clumsier creature had taken hold of his body and was now manipulating it. Martiya felt the hairs on her arms prickle. The shaman began to speak quickly in a voice a full octave deeper than the man's normal voice, and when Martiya asked what he was saying, Vinai responded in an apologetic hushed whisper that he did not know the shaman-talk. The spooky performance continued for almost an hour, until the shaman suddenly collapsed.
Of all the aspects of village life, just what happened to that man who in the daytime looked like a dead president and in the nighttime was a raving monster most aroused Martiya's curiosity. She wanted to know what had happened to him. She was in no position yet to answer the question, but the fact that she had a question that she was eager to answer was of tremendous psychological importance to her as she struggled with the language, the weather, the ubiquitous strangeness of the people, and particularly her host, whom she hated more intensely than any other human being since the sixth grade, when Alice Wilkerson put gum in her hair.
Not long after Farts-a-Lot vomited on her notebook, Martiya went to town to get her mail. This was something she did every couple of weeks. The Dyalo women, most of whom had only been out of the mountains once or twice in their lives, were stunned at Martiya's bravery, going into the lowlands like this by herself, and even the men, who regularly went down to the plains to buy bullets for their guns, or to sell corn, thought the nonchalant way that Martiya walked out of the village, carrying nothing with her but a small pack, an extraordinarily bold gesture: How did she know that she would find acceptable food and water down there? Lowland rice, the Dyalo felt, was gross, and murky lowland water unreliable. And how did she know that the spirits would be friendly the whole way?
The hike to the highway took Martiya a morning, but in the dry of the cool season, it was a pleasant jaunt. In the mists and fogs of the rainy season, the mountains had been claustrophobic, hemmed in by the gray; but now the skies were blue, and Martiya could see lime-green valleys and jagged hills as she walked, and then more hills beyond, and then, in the far distance, the broad plain of Chiang Rai, which stretched all the way to Burma. She passed through two villages, both Lahu, and by now she had been with the Dyalo long enough that she couldn't help but think as she saw the Lahu that they did look just a little like monkeys. The end of the rainy season brought more flowers into bloom than existed in the imagination of the most passionate English gardener: fields of wild roses and jasmine and day lilies, hyacinths and orchids curling off of every rotting log and tree. The villagers led water buffalo along the narrow trails, their hindquarters stained red with dust. Once she got down to the main road, she only had to wait a few minutes by the side of the road before a grizzled Thai farmer in a beat-up old pickup truck gave her a lift into town, and when she told him that she was living in a Dyalo village high in the hills, the farmer spat out the window and said, "Bah! You live with those animals?"
Martiya, as was her custom, spent the day in town. Even by Thai standards, it was a little place, nothing more than a post office, a market, a gas station, a noodle stall, a temple, and a few large concrete Chinese shop-houses — and yet, after Dan Loi, it felt like a metropolis. There was ice here, and Coca-Cola, and television. Motorcycles buzzed down the street, and music played on the radio. Martiya collected her mail and sat at the small restaurant on a real chair at a real table, and slowly went through the stack, letter by letter. Her father had written her a long letter describing the latest conference that he had attended — Piers van der Leun was a great lover of academic conferences, and spent a substantial portion of his time traveling from one to the next; and Joseph Atkinson, to tell her that he had received the carbon copies of her field notes, and in his opinion, she needed to consider spending more time in the fields. "Grab a hoe!" he wrote. Karen had written her a long, ecstatic gushing Karen-gram, consisting chiefly of a recital of the details of Karen's dreams. Her former landlady in Berkeley had forwarded a package of bills.
Martiya responded to all of the letters immediately, as she always did. She wrote to her father, telling him proudly how much progress she was making with the language. She wrote to Joseph Atkinson, telling him that the very last thing he ever wanted to see was her with a hoe— there was no saying in which of his orifices that implement might end up. She wrote to Karen, telling her all about her dreams. She'd had this one about being in San Francisco but everyone was speaking in Dyalo. Then she wrote a long description of her day, finishing with her sitting in a café in town responding to her correspondence. She was very nervous, she said, because she was about to take a huge risk with her fieldwork. The bills she ignored.
Then Martiya wrote herself a letter. The Dyalo wouldn't be able to read it, of course, but putting it all down in black-and-white on the page made the sad news seem more real, more substantial. She inserted the letter into the envelope in which her father had written to her. The postage stamps gave it a nice look, she felt — official and serious. Martiya ate a large lunch, and then, sleepy in the afternoon heat but determined, made her way home to Dan Loi, hitchhiking her way back up into the hills, then walking up the dusty trail.
By the time she got to the village in the late evening, she was a mess: her clothes were covered in dirt, her long hair matted and di-sheveled. This was because several times she had lain down in the path and rolled herself in the mud. She was barely coherent as she stumbled into the hut. Martiya had always had the gift of producing tears on demand; this had won her a number of parts in her high school plays. Now, she had only to enter into the hut, settle herself onto her mat, and allow a few soft tears to tumble from her large eyes to attract Lai-Ma's attention. Lai-Ma could no more resist comforting the evidently distraught Martiya than she would have been able to ignore one of her own children.
"Tell me what has happened," Lai-Ma said, settling herself beside Martiya and running her weathered hand through the anthropologist's wild, mud-streaked hair. The whole hut, from little Ping to Farts-a-Lot, sat watching Martiya, as she stared into the last red coals of the cooling fire.
"He was so young," Martiya said. "Such a young man."
"Who?" Lai-Ma said. "What has the East Wind brought?" For reasons Martiya did not yet know, the Dyalo associated winds from the east with inauspicious tidings.
Martiya buried her face in her hands. Dyalo grief was no restrained affair, she knew, and she decided that it would not be inappropriate to wail. She began to weep and moan. She wasn't quite sure how to rend her garments, but she gave it a try and succeeded in ripping her T-shirt. She pulled out the tattered envelope from her father, opened it up, and in a distraught voice read out in English the terrible news that she had received: the rain-slick road, the car, the long vigil at the hospital, then the most brutal of all blows — and although no one in the hut could understand what she was saying, the awesome display of communication from the white man's land impressed everyone. Finally, with a masterful display of self-possession, Martiya explained in Dyalo what bad fortune had blown in on the bad East Wind.
Even Farts-a-Lot looked moved and sad.