Never Betray A Friend

Genre: Short story, horror, travelogue.

Never Betray A Friend

by C.S. Humble

I blame all of this on John Steinbeck for writing Travels with Charley: In Search of America. That started the whole goddamn thing. Happened a few years ago. I read Johnny’s book and got the itch to just, just go and discover the world I felt I was missing. Told my dad I wanted to travel. He didn’t balk. “You should take someone you can trust. Someone that will stay by your side, no matter what happens.” Dad gets me. Foster father that took on the full-time gig. Time and time again his advice not only saved my ass, but also taught me things about the world. Taught me about self-acceptance. Best man I know.

Coming in second to my pops is Marty. Best friend and consummate wingman, Marty is the kind of guy you never want to let down. And in terms of ass-saving-ability, he only takes the silver because Dad’s been there since just after the start of the race. So, when it came to asking someone to go with me, Marty wasn’t the logical candidate. He was the only candidate.

We planned the whole trip. May to August. I didn’t just want to discover America, though. I had my whole life to do that. I wanted to walk the battlements of Mont St. Michel. Ride a steamer train through the Austrian Alps. Visit the fucking Hobbit houses in New Zealand. 

Do not judge me. 

Marty had his own notions. A big Anthony Bourdain fan, Marty said that some of the best places in the world to visit were those you could lose yourself in. Thailand was that place for him. The food, the culture. And drunk on the power of the friendship pocket veto, he crossed out where I had written ‘Greece’, and scrawled the name of that little country squashed by Cambodia, Laos, a strip of Malaysia, and Burma. No big deal. 

Those of you who have flown ‘across the pond’ (I feel like a goober writing that, but it’s the accepted nomenclature. Fuck it.) know that the flight can be absolutely brutal. Nine hours of Sandra Bullock movies and some kind of chicken meal that I absolutely do not have the stomach for. Marty was happy to scarf it down because he’s more garbage disposal than human being.

We landed in London. Hit the tube to Oxford and took our happy American asses to the Eagle and Child where Lewis and Tolkien once swilled beer and argued over magic Jesus lions and four foot farmers who, together, became the heroes of their age. After a few drinks, Marty struck up a conversation with a curvy brunette. So I excused myself to test the food scene, which wasn’t anything great. Tasty and filling, but nothing to write home about. I came back to find Marty sulking in a pint.

“Not interested?” I asked.

“Worse.” He was all broken-up about it. “She left with someone else. Guy stepped right in between us.” 

I tried not to laugh. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“He was big, Man. Like, fucking Viking chieftain big. One word out of me and,” Marty ran his thumbnail across my back and made the unmistakable mating call of a switchblade. “He’d have blood-eagled me, right here on the bar.”

At that, we both laughed.

I bought us a round, and like dirty American revolutionaries visiting the land our forefather’s once called master, we drank until the early morning hours, right up until they shut the place down. 55 degrees outside (no I don’t know what it is in Celsius and I don’t care), fog rolling through the ancient streets. I half expected to see a pipe-smoking detective in a deer-stalker cap come striding past us.He didn’t. Making it the first, but not the most major disappointment I would experience.

Tower of London. Piccadilly Circus. The whole deal. Unforgettable. 

Then, via train, which just a parenthetical here, why the fuck hasn’t America figured out trains yet? And don’t give me “Owen, it’s too big” bullshit. American Big Oil and Big Auto can suck a fat one. 

Anyway. 

London to Litz our train whirrs us through postcard landscapes that have a kind of beauty words can’t capture. Which, I get, sounds like something a Hallmark romance protagonist might say, but truth is truth no matter where it’s spoken. We slide into Vienna and I won’t even bother you with the number of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade references we made. And it was a little weird, because I thought Vienna would carry a kind of ancient weight to it. And it did, for the first two days or so, but after a while, you’re just on an old floating city. Gondolas are fun...the first few times. The local cuisine was easy to hunt down and a little better than the U.K. My mom and dad had honeymooned there and pops said I should go by the hotel they stayed in, but honestly, it felt weird to visit a place that’s only historical importance is that it’s the place where your parents screwed for a week. 

Might just be me.

Marty spent a lot of time to himself while he was there. Which was fine. Part of being a good friend is knowing when you need a little break from each other. So, while he was off sowing his oats among the Austrian brothel fare, I was enjoying the city and the warmth of the people who live there. We’d meet back up at our hostel and we’d rapture ourselves in the kind of fellowship that’s reserved for brothers and pack hunters. Then, it was time for our fated torture. A twenty-one hour plane ride over the pan-flat deserts of Abrahamic faiths and so close to the Himalayan peaks that I imagined myself touching the snows of Everest with an outstretched hand. Majesty is the only word that comes close to the experience.

Chiang Mai, I cannot wholly describe. More a fairytale than a place. Doi Suthep equals anything the masters of the Renaissance stacked together. And at night, when the golden temples glow as bright as sunlight, they prove Europe’s superior. Something happens when you touch down there and exit onto the bustling streets. Something that gets inside of you so deep it shows up in your sweat. Unique aromas enlighten your olfactory receptors. You hear a language that is sharp and complex, beautiful in a way no romance language of the West could ever be.

Marty, guided by the wisdom of the late St. Anthony Bourdain, knew that when he wrote Thailand on our notepad he was both fulfilling a dream and giving me a gift. We burned our candles bright every night, right down to the base of the wick. Never ceasing, never satisfied. We found marvels and delights in Chiang Mai that I can still taste even all these years later.  

And it’s so painful to recall. Painful because of the choice I let Marty talk me into. And the choice I had to make because of it.

After a week of bouncing around Thailand, where we took in the sights and sounds and lives of what can only be described as an indomitable people, Marty and I headed back to our hotel from an evening of watching Thai-boxing pugilists. The thundering, almost oppressive drums drove men and boys alike to make war and gambling for fistfuls of Baht had our warrior spirits frothing primal. Marty wanted to go deeper, lose himself further. He demanded we go off-schedule. Off script. Take a bus ride of over twenty-fucking-hours to the border of Cambodia and then, by way of taxi, visit Siem Reap. I had never heard of the place, and I was running on fumes. I just needed to recharge my batteries, grab a meal, and rest-up for our flight to New Zealand.

Marty was having none of it. “Siem Reap is the capital of Cambodia,” he said. And with the fire of adventure in his eyes driven to its height by what we’d just seen, he made his case.

“Siem Reap means ‘The Defeat of Siam’, named after what is the greatest victory in the history of their people,” he said. “I’m going to see it before we visit those little fucking hobbit houses, because we’re not traveling, Amigo. We’re discovering. And one day, we’ll both have a passel of kids and we’ll be able to tell them the accounting of that place. We won’t explain it to them. We’ll describe it to them. Not because we read it on cock-sucking Wikipedia, but because we trod the steps of Cambodian kings.”

I remember every word of it, the lightning in Marty’s voice. I have never heard its equal in waking life. I was moved. How could I not be?

I agreed.

I suggested we split up for our last night in Chiang Mai. He’d do his thing. I’d do mine. Marty hated the idea, and so, because you never want to let Marty down, I made the stupid fucking decision to stay together. I hadn’t eaten since late the night before and he wanted to drink and drink and drink until the sun came up.

The next morning, we were both still drunk when the bus headed for the Cambodian border was punching out. We stumbled onto the rig, pounding water. Just a pair of American white boys amid a throng of Thai that clearly wanted nothing to do with our dumb asses. I can’t blame them.

I took the aisle seat. Then, promptly passed out for what I hoped would be the entirety of the bus ride. And I did sleep for a bit, but hunger twisted my guts, and I woke up. The sun had long since retired, and I found Marty reading via a little booklight. He was scarfing down peanut butter crackers and had killed the water jug. 

And just as I was about to ask what time it was when a sodium white light cut through the back window of the bus and a cavalcade of trucks roared past us. They flew by our window and I could see men standing in the beds of the trucks, gripping steel racks lined with flood lights. They were wearing fatigues. All of them were armed.

The sour acid of fear burned my throat . Not because of the trucks, though that was scary enough in its own right, but because of the trembling rush of panic that went through the Thais surrounding us. I did not know what was happening. They did. And the terror on their moonlighted faces crossed the wide gap between their language and my understanding.

The trucks passed in the opposing lane, then crossed over into ours. The red lights of the trucks’ brakes shot through the front window and our bus slowed. The driver pulled over onto the shoulder near the lip of an impossibly dark jungle. Then, we stopped.

“What the fuck?” Though he tried to play the tough, Marty’s voice was shaking harder than the idling bus engine. The idling lights painted a clear picture of what he was feeling.

What we were both feeling.

Then, the idling rumble died, the driver killing the engine. The light illuminating the interior of the bus vanished. Darkness filled the cab.

A mass panic of sound rolled through the bus.

The driver bellowed one word.

Every passenger was silenced. 

I peered past Marty and we watched the heavily-armed group of men stride along the side of the bus, their rifles clutched in their hands. I heard their voices. One of them said something, which prompted others to round to the back of the bus at the emergency exit. One of them, a clear leader, stepped to the front entry and tapped on the glass with something hard and metallic.  

The bus door hissed, clattering open.

He was a small man, unremarkable in every aspect except for the pistol clutched in his hand. He laid the gun over the seat closest to him. He began to speak. Speak with absolute authority. 

Marty and I had no clue what he was saying. 

You pick up words in other countries, but not the language. But the command in his voice told me, told all of us, who the fuck was in charge.

A flashlight in his hand swept through the bus, scanning.

The light  passed over me, illuminated Marty, then cut back to me.

That’s when I knew I had fucked up. 

With a pair of declarations from him, every Thai-speaking occupant of the bus stood up and filed out. 

Marty placed a cold hand on my forearm. “What the fuck is going on, Owen? Did we...did we do something wrong? We didn’t do anything!”

I didn’t respond because I knew. Knew I hadn’t been careful enough in Chiang Mai like I had in Europe. Someone had seen me.

They’d seen me while I was eating.

These police or military or whatever the fuck they were, they learned the truth and they had me cornered. I felt weak, my reserves of strength almost fully depleted from the drinking and lack of nourishment over the last forty-eight hours. I’d recovered after our flight to London by taking a drunken businessman in a back alley while Marty suffered the loss of his brunette. And I’d feasted on illegal prostitutes in Austria, while my best friend had visited the brothels. Chiang Mai though, I’d devoured too many there. All of them were the flavor of fear, and wild desperation. A taste, I had once thought, was second to none.

These men had surrounded our bus to destroy me. A creature that’s more man than monster, but a self-accepted monster with dietary requirements. I tried to live the other way, pops tried to help me. But he learned and he loved. Taught me the hunt and the precaution I should always take.

It wasn’t my intent to deceive, but, this isn’t a travelogue.

It’s a confession. 

I’d fucked it up. And it was going to cost Marty and I everything.

The will to survive overpowered my sense of fidelity. Without my strength, a strength that defies reason, I would die in this bus. We would both die in this bus. The men with guns would act quickly. 

I acted first. 

I turned to my best friend, let my limbs stretch to their true proportion, and I opened my mouth.

All the way.

You will find it hard to believe that, at first, there were tears. Regret and self-disgust.

Where with my whole life I had tasted terror in the skin and flesh and bone of others, for the first time in my life I tasted Marty’s final emotional rush--betrayal. And, the truth of it, is that I have never tasted anything so succulent. Nothing even comes close.

I escaped with my life. Finished the trip. Even managed to visit those hobbit houses in New Zealand.

Got back home, told Dad about it all. He understood. Like I said, he’s the best.

I should have never betrayed Marty. Because now, that’s the only taste that satisfies. And I wonder, really wonder, when I meet and connect with new people, am I doing it for the fellowship or for the flavor.