With You by Bike by Katrina Rosen

Author:Katrina Rosen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2019-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Chiang Rai

Never Enough Bananas

My fingers, wet with lavender oil, traced over the bumps on Mike’s arm, connecting them like the villages on our map. A long line of red welts paraded from the base of his head, down his neck, across his broad shoulder, tramping over his elbow and falling off at his wrist. We sat on the ground beside a monastery.

“Try not to scratch them this time. They’ll go away faster,” I encouraged softly.

“I’ll try. Unfortunately, I’m getting used to them.” It was Mike’s third time feeding bed bugs in Thailand. I didn’t react to them. That, or because I wore more clothes to sleep, I was less susceptible to being bitten. I dabbed more drops of oil on the pads of my fingers. Mike swallowed a bite of banana while I smeared oil on his skin and massaged his arm. The calming scent of lavender mixed with the sweet smell of Asian bananas.

“Let’s leave the rest of our bananas here,” he said, and gestured with a nod of his head to the monastery. His helmet rested on top of his bike. His hair, though we had only travelled five kilometres since our guest house on the Wang River, stood up like a rooster comb where the air vents from his helmet let it escape. Mike looked hot. The sun, not yet high, gnawed on us with an insatiable appetite. Dogs hung out nearby, waiting for us to drop food.

We had been in Thailand for two months and the longer we stayed, the more we craved. In return, we fed the country our leftovers. Fed it with our skin. Fed it with our energy. It drank our blood and licked up our crumbs.

The day before, large dogs had chased us, their tongues flapping in the air between menacing barks. Mike reached over to my bike, ripped off some bananas from my rack and, with his legs still spinning, threw them at the dogs. It was not our first dog chase, as they seemed to make a sport out of terrorizing slow bicycles. Even so, we still had too many bananas. Villagers generously gifted us bunches of them, and though we ate as many as we could, the bananas were heavy, especially now that we were in the hills. Two dozen bananas strapped to the back of my bike felt like I was attached to a bungee cord, forever being pulled backwards.

“Good idea.” I stood up and walked to the front steps of the monastery and left our bananas at the entrance.

We climbed more hills, rolling gradients of green toward Chiang Rai. We were far north, close to the borders of Myanmar and Laos and near the periphery of the golden triangle, one of the most expansive opium-producing farmlands in the world. Smoke from burning fields filled the air. We swallowed juicy bites of humidity – wet like a peeled mangosteen – yet the smoke ground against our throats like sand, raw and abrasive, and our lungs starved for oxygen.

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