We ran out of gas.

Jay was looking quite evil, so I slid off and wandered over to an open shack where several young men were playing pool. They called to an old woman, who took one look at my empty plastic bottle, grabbed my wrist and tore off down the road. She went from one boarded-up hut to the next, hammering on the walls and loudly explaining my plight, until a slender hand passed out a liter of gasoline in exchange for a crisp new ten thousand Dong note. The old woman marched me briskly back to the bike, supervised Jay as he refilled the tank, accepted a small gratuity, then strode home to confront the next crisis, a drunken quarrel over the misuse of a pool cue.

A mile further the bike quit again. "Gas?" I asked hopefully. Jay played with the starter until the battery was totally drained, and so were we. The herd of cows passed us again.

I set off once more, this time in search of a repair shop amidst the rural huts and fields. The patrons of a nearby open-air bar poured out to offer inebriated advice. They swarmed over the bike, pulling off spark plug caps, jiggling the gas tank and ordering Jay to "start" while they drunkenly listened to the engine tick over. They pondered the situation and gave him their solemn verdict.

"Bike dead. You drink."

He wasn't in the mood. They put their heads together, even more baffled, while I passed around sugar cookies and slapped curious hands away from the zippers on our packs.

Finally they patted the bike and muttered "keo" under their breaths, the word leaping from one to the next like illicit whiskey. I whipped out my dictionary and looked it up. "Drag". Great word. Two dollars, they said, to haul the Beast into town. I agreed, a little too quickly. They conferred. Five dollars, they said, per mile. We bartered for twenty minutes, while the mosquitoes alternated with the intermittent rain and one of the more inebriated pool players stumbled around, looking for rope.

I slid on the back of a pint-sized Honda and watched them harness it to the Beast. They wrapped the rope several times around Jay's handlebars and tucked the end under his fingers. My driver had just eased his bike into gear when a military jeep swooped down on us and came to a stop in a spray of gravel. Several soldiers jumped out and strutted, stiff-legged, over to Jay. They barked at us for our papers and circled the Beast suspiciously, as though the breakdown were just an elaborate ruse to keep us out after curfew. Then they kicked the back wheel and told us to park it in the pub. We were under arrest.

Our newfound friends saw their windfall evaporating before their eyes and quickly went to work. They demonstrated the bike's many illnesses, shook the rope to emphasize the ingenuity of their solution, then invited one and all for a drink. Once the soldiers were safely inside my driver started his engine and we wobbled off, towing the decidedly unsteady Jay like a water-skier at the end of a long rope.

All went well until we reached the cross streets on the outskirts of the city. It was pitch black, stoplights hadn't yet been invented, and the intersecting traffic simply wove through itself like the warp and weft of a loom. Without battery power to run his lights, Jay was nearly invisible and no one expected the thin rope that tied us together. By the time we arrived at the hotel he was several shades paler and I was hoarse from shouting at shadowy mopeds that swerved away in the nick of time.