devil's luck

"Nice suit, mister. You got a light?"

The kid spoke good English, though the words were inflected with the lilting lightness of his native tongue. He was scrawny, maybe thirteen, and a slightly bent cigarette jutted crookedly from the corner of his mouth. The boy was loitering under an awning along the broad, dusty village road, watching the occasional foreigner pass by with the sharp eyes of a born pimp or hustler.

"Yeah."

The American paused and pulled a lighter from his pocket, cupping his hand to protect the flame as the boy leaned forward. The November air hung mercifully cooler than the rainy season just past, but the sun was still strong enough that the stranger wore an opaque pair of sunglasses against the light. They stood and smoked for a while, the man's eyes and the boy's surveying the midday bustle. A few years after the fall of the Khmer Rogue, and travelers like the American were still rare; but the boy kept sharp eyes watching for them and waited. Even the occasional Vietnamese needing a local guide meant a little money.

"You going somewhere?" the kid asked.

The American's mouth skewed a little, and the boy noticed his white teeth when he smiled. Bleached-bone white, and the incisors were strangely sharp, reminding him of the stray dogs that sometimes meandered through, but fiercer. "Not until later. There anything interesting to see around here?"

The spent the afternoon touring the surrounding roadways, their surfaces ruined and ragged from the civil war so that the stranger and the boy often had to dismount from the battered motorcycle the man had bought for a handful of dollars and walk until they found a clearer stretch of road. They passed rice fields, the occasional elephant, the old ruins of Buddhist temples. As evening drew on, the stranger stopped the motorcycle near where he'd found the boy, and they sat down to eat steaming ka tieu with his mother's sister.

"You ever been to Angkor Wat, kid?" he asked, as the woman cleared their bowls.

"Of course."

"I've always found Eastern religions fascinating," he said, patting his jacket for another smoke.

The boy made a soft scoff: "We're all Buddhist here."

"Good. Christianity's bullshit. Don't waste your time."

As the American walked his machine back into the village, he handed the boy a thick handful of bills, and watched him inspect the currency with a calm but appraising eye before hiding it away inside his clothes. They kept walking for a few minutes as the daylight angled low in the sky, staining it with sunset colors.

"What's your plan, anyway, kid? What're you gonna do with yourself?"

The boy grinned a little, but it was a private expression. "I'm going to save enough money to leave. Move to Hong Kong, maybe, or move to New York. Be in movies."

"Huh, no shit?"

"There's a man who's going to pay me a lot of money to work for him for a while," the boy said. Matter-of-fact, cool, because the kid didn't strike him as gullible or stupid. Here was a kid who knew something, as if it were a genuine insider's secret. Or something the boy could admit to a man he'd never see again. "Dangerous stuff. But I'll only need to do it for a few years."

"Hm," the foreigner mused. "Careful. Some masters let their servants come and go as they please. Some keep them locked away. A cage with gold bars is still a cage, you know."

The boy didn't answer, but stuck another cigarette in his mouth as they paused at the edge of the village's main road.

"So, kid, you gonna remember me when you're a bigshot movie star in Hong Kong or New York? Or am I just another American?"

"Of course I will," the boy lied.

"What's your name, anyway?"

"Heng," the boy said. "In English, it means Lucky."