Survival in the Killing Fields Read Online Free Page B

anything. I didn’t need any money. There was nothing I wanted enough to steal from my family. If they didn’t trust me, how could I live with them under the same
roof? How could I accept their authority?
    Early the next morning I ran away.
    My first stop was Samrong Yong’s open-air market. It took up one corner of the village’s only road intersection, across from the garrison of French-backed troops
and their tall stone watchtower.
    The market was the centre of village commerce and gossip. Women thronged the aisles, bargaining, pinching the neat piles of fresh vegetables and fruits, peering critically at the basins of live,
wiggling fish. Vendors sold grilled chicken and rice confections wrapped in banana leaves. At restaurant stalls, customers sat down to order bowls of soup prepared to their liking. I couldn’t
buy anything, though. No money. I talked with people I knew and kept an eye out for my family.
    In the early afternoon, an old passenger bus rolled into the lot next to the market. The driver was a distant cousin, a man whose name was Kruy.
    ‘Uncle, Uncle!’ I called to him. 2
    ‘Well! Ngor Haing, eh? What happened to you?’ Uncle Kruy said to me from the driver’s window.
    I came around to the door of his bus. ‘My father beat me last night for stealing playing cards from the store. But I didn’t steal them.’
    ‘Well, come along, then. I’ll give you a shirt to put over all those bruises.’ I got in, and off the bus went with a roar of its diesel engine as Kruy shifted through the
gears.
    Kruy and his wife lived south of my village, in central Takeo province. He was the sole owner and operator of the rickety passenger bus. Every day he made a trip from his village to Phnom Penh
and back again along National Route 2, stopping in the marketplace of every village and town along the way.
    At his house Kruy gave me a shirt and a straw hat. The next morning I began working for him, collecting fares. It was unbelievably noisy inside the bus: The pounding of the worn-out suspension
on potholes had loosened all the bolts and rivets. Passengers squeezed in next to one another on the hard wooden benches until they were almost on each other’s laps. Just when it seemed the
bus could take no more, Kruy slowed and stopped for an old wrinkled monk standing beside the road with his parasol. The monk climbed up into the bus and headed for the seats in the back. The
passengers shifted over to accommodate him and, amazingly, there was plenty of room. Everybody knew how important it was to treat monks with respect. It was particularly important that women not
touch them, even accidentally, because monks had to be pure. And it would have been unthinkable to ask monks to pay fares. They rode free. Even I knew that, on my first day.
    When he saw that I knew how to collect fares and count money, Kruy put me on top of the bus, in the luggage rack, and made me responsible for cargo. The luggage rack was piled higher than my
head with packages and suitcases and bicycles and furniture. There were wicker baskets with live pigs grunting inside, baskets with chickens and ducks clucking and quacking, tightly woven baskets
with live snakes and baskets with produce for the Phnom Penh market. At every stop, I lowered cargo from the roof to the outstretched arms of its owner on the ground, and reached down to pull the
new cargo up.
    I also helped with bribes. When Kruy came to government checkpoints, he downshifted, pulled over to the side of the road and stopped, while I scampered down the ladder on the back of the bus,
adjusted my hat and walked into the sentry’s hut.
    Inside, the sentry pretended to scrutinize the bus for an overload, or for communist guerrillas, or for whatever he might choose to think was wrong with it. I took my hat off respectfully and
placed it on the table next to his clipboard, moved the hat so the
riel
notes in the hatband fell out and pushed the money under the clipboard with my