Bangkok Knights (7 page)

Dexy had ordered a Singha and a round for the house. He
was telling us how he’d spent his day. “Oh, yeah; she was dead tired. I mean,
wouldn’t you be? It’s 8:45 in the morning and you’ve just spent the night
tossing some John. The sun’s up. You deposit your money and you’re turning away
from the automatic teller machine, and now...”

”You sure she was hustling, Dexy? I mean...”

“Sure? Of course I’m sure. God, she was yawning — you
could see clear down to her asshole — but she still gives me the big come—on.
Unbelievable.”

“Unbelievable,” I agreed. “So what did you do?”

“Well, you know, I took her home. Yuh know what I mean?”

“What?”

“Well, yeah. I was horny. I mean, what the hell.”

Dexy worked offshore Indonesia, where he’d spend one month
on the rig doing eighty-four-hour weeks and minting money before returning to
base, in Bangkok, to spend the alternate month getting rid of the loot on beer,
whiskey, and the satiation of all those carnal appetites he’d honed to such a
keen edge during those long days and nights on the rig.

“Sweet and sour,” he told us. “And that’s exactly how I
like it. Sweet is Bangkok, and sour is the platform, and both are fine with me.
But one requires the other, or it don’t all taste just right. Yuh know what I
mean?”

“But don’t it ever get to you?” Doc asked. “I mean not
having anybody waiting for you, when you’re out there. How old are you now? You
can’t go on this way for ever.”

“Why not?” replied Dexy. “I like it... Anyway, I been
married already.”

This was news. Except maybe for Leary, our little assembly
showed surprise. Somehow, you hadn’t figured Dexy for the marrying type.

“Yeah. For five years. Then one night we had a party, back
at the house. That was back in Georgia. I got kinda drunk, I guess, ‘cause I
woke up on the bedroom floor. And there was my best buddy and my wife, my
king-size water bed just a-sloshin’ away.

“I said ‘You folks want some coffee?’ Then I went
downstairs and I got out my deer rifle, a nice 30-30 Winchester. I poured a
drink and sat around for a while. Then I put the rifle back in its case and I
left. I never went back. The lawyers took care of everything. The wife did
pretty well out of it, I can tell you.”

I’d never before heard Dexy come out with such an extended
piece of discourse without half of it being obscenity. His flat, matter-of-fact
delivery somehow lent the story more force.

”Never again. You just give me a good bar on the corner, a
couple of buddies to drink with, and a good whorehouse down the street. That’s
all I need. That’s all I’m ever gonna need.”

There was a silence wherein we all paid respect to Dexy’s
hard-won wisdom, except for Eddie, who was only silent.

“Could be worse,” Doc said. I saw him look at his empty
glass and then look down the bar at the other glasses. There was evidence of an
inner conflict before he signaled Dinky Toy to set up a round on the house.

“Could be lots worse,” he continued.” Do you remember a
guy name of Alf, from the States — North Carolina, I believe — who married
Daeng from the old Danny’s Dozen Bar? Maybe you heard some of the troubles he
had. Like the house they bought, it cost twice as much as it should’ve, and
imagine how he felt when he found out that the guy he’d bought it from was
Daeng’s uncle, no wonder they paid such a good price. When he went around to
complain to the uncle, the uncle and a couple of his friends used Alf for
kick-boxing practice. When he told the police about this, explaining he thought
he should get treated better than that, being an in-law and all, he couldn’t
find a witness; even his wife, Daeng, said there’s no way her dear uncle
would’ve done anything bad to her dear husband.

“Marriage is a matter of give and take, and Alf decided
he’d have to take it for the time being; but he told me, once, he wasn’t sure
after all if he’d done the right thing by getting married.

“And he was right, because next thing he knew, that
brother of Daeng’s — the one that just wouldn’t go away, always hanging around
the house sleeping or else drinking and playing cards with his buddies? — the
‘brother’ turned out to be no brother at all; he turned out to be Daeng’s Thai
husband, a little skeleton in the closet, there.

“Well, Alf figures that’s about enough of that, and he
gets some legal help. He thinks he’d like to get back the money that went into
the house, and such-like. His lawyer thinks there might be hope, in this case,
since there’s a supernumerary husband in the picture, and even though this is Thailand, and people are generally pretty relaxed about this kind of thing.

“So it looks as though Alf might come out of all this in not
too bad shape, after all, and I tell him I’m very happy for him and I hope he’s
learned a lesson or two.

”He said he had, but I guess it was too late, because next
thing I read in the papers, a week or so later, an American named Alf is found
down a well, dead, and it is this Alf. Turns out his mother-in-law pays to have
him beaten to death and then dumped. She only has the best interests of her
family at heart, it seems, and
this farang
was about to make all kinds
of trouble for them.

“According to the papers, Daeng herself felt her mum had
gone a bit too far, and she felt sorry for Alf. In fact, I heard she spoke more
fondly of him after he was gone than she ever had while he was alive. Of course
he was a lot more use to have around when he was dead. In a manner of speaking.
The cops locked her up no matter how sorry she was, but not for too long, I’d
imagine, since her old lady already admitted she was the one who took out the
contract Daeng’s Thai husband and various other hangers-on are no doubt looking
after the house till she gets out.”

“Marry an orphan,” said Eddie.

“Don’t marry nobody.” Dexy preferred the principal part of
Leary’s Law. “A woman ain’t nothing but a life-support system for a pussy,
anyhow. Yuh know what I mean? And what do you want to buy a cow for, anyways,
when milk’s so cheap?

Now, even though Lek was his wife, I knew Eddie had a
good
deal of affection for the lady, and you could see he really wanted to say
something to Dexy. Even though at the same time he really didn’t want to. In
the end, however, pique won out over prudence.

“Dexy,” he said. “You lame-brained bag of wind. You
obscene fart-bag. I’m not surprised you couldn’t hang onto a wife. With your
attitude towards women, you’d be lucky to get a lady to
talk
to you,
much less live with you.”

Dexy roared with pleasure at what he obviously took to be
a rare compliment.
‘Talk
to me? Why am I gonna want some woman to
talk
to me? Listen here: I’m gonna give you the specifications of the perfect
woman—and I’m an expert; I’ve seen more pussy than you’ve ever even dreamed of.
Your ideal woman is about three foot tall with a flat head, and she turns into
a six-pack and a ham sandwich at midnight.”

“A flat head?” inquired Doc.

“Some place to put your beer. Haw, haw, haw.

”Hey, Big Toy,” Dexy directed in a voice that made Eddie
wince. “Feed all these life-support systems some more colas; colas for
everybody. Keep all these here pussies happy. Have a drink yourself, Big Toy.”

Eddie should’ve known better than to stir Dexy up.

“I’ve got some stuff I’ve got to do back at the
guesthouse,” Eddie said, even though I’d never known him to leave Boon Doc’s
just before Happy Hour merely because there was a job waiting for him at home.

“Hey, I gotta go too,” Dexy told us. “I got a heavy date —
Number Thirty-seven over at Smokin’ Sal’s Saloon. A regular little wildcat,
looks about sixteen. Sweet sixteen. A real beauty. Though she has got a bad
bite.”

No one wanted to touch this one; you hated to think what
old Dexy might be talking about.

“Can’t hardly sleep, what with her bad bite, and all. Of
course, she’s such a sweetie-pie it seems a shame to sleep anyhow. Yuh know
what I mean?”

After Dexy had left, Eddie ordered a round. When I asked
him about the chores back at the guesthouse, he asked me “What chores?”

“Ah, gosh, Dexy’s okay,” said Leary. “Only he’s not what
you’d call real sensitive, that’s all. You know he’s got nothing but respect
for Lek, Eddie. It’s just his way.

“Anyway, he must be getting friggin’ soft: here he is
talking about seeing this young kid at Sal’s, he sounds like it’s some kind of
heavy date or something. That’s not like Dexy. Gosh. Usually he won’t spend
more than one night with the same girl. It’s like policy. Doesn’t even want to
spend a whole night with the same girl, usually. Says he likes ‘short-times’—
no time to get bored, he says. And you don’t have to wait for the toilet in the
morning, besides.”

“He’s an emotional retard,” was Eddie’s opinion.

I hadn’t seen
Boon Doc’s that crowded in a long time. Just about all the regulars were there,
plus any number of strange faces all told, there must’ ve been a dozen people,
easy. And that’s not counting Doc’s girls. There were seven of these specimens
— Big Toy, Dinky Toy, Keeow, Nid, Noi, Boom, and Sue-wang, and they looked great
that night, all decked out in their party togs. You could see half of them were
getting pissed, though none of them normally drank except maybe for Big Toy,
who had a nervous condition. But it was a party, after all, and Doc was nowhere
to be seen, so let the good times roll, why not?

We were there at Doc’s invitation. The first drink had
been on the house, and the food was free. Not only that, but Happy Hour was
being extended right through till closing time, according to the announcement
scrawled on the big card behind the bar.

FIRST DRINK FREE

ALL YOU CAN EAT,

NEVER MIND DINKY TOY
COOKED MOST OF IT

HAPPY HOURS TILL
1:00

HAPPY HOURS FOREVER!

AND BEST WISHES
ALWAYS, MY FRIENDS

Had Doc come into an inheritance, or what?

It was seven o’clock, and the party had been in full swing
for a couple of hours already. The only thing was, our host hadn’t yet made his
appearance, and we were all still in the dark as to what the big occasion was.
Why had Doc decided to blow the air-conditioning repair fund on this lavish
soiree?

Dexy was there, and he’d brought Number Thirty-seven from
Smokin’ Sal’s with him. This represented a departure from established
procedure. It was not conventional for habitues of Boon Doc’s to bring their
little doxies to Happy Hour, especially if these doxies gave every appearance
of being sweet sixteen and hardly ever even kissed, maybe. It was bad for the
morale of Doc’s girls, for one thing. For another, it simply wasn’t
done,

Besides all that, as Leary pointed out, Dexy never took
girls out Why is anybody gonna take any broad out when they ain’t nothin’ but
life-support systems for pussies, anyhow? Right? So after twenty minutes or
half an hour there’s nothin’ you can do with them, and they’re going to be
cluttering up the head in the morning besides. Did we know what he meant?

Yet there he was—there
she
was—and he’d introduced
her to most of us as “Little Miss Thirty-seven, here, from Smokin’ Sal’ s
Saloon: ain’t she a beauty?” You had to suspect he was relatively serious about
her, as well, or he probably wouldn’t have bothered introducing her at all.

I didn’t hear anyone else refer to her as “#37”. In fact,
nobody said much of anything to her — she didn’t speak English, not beyond the
most basic Bargirl English, anyway, and she didn’t come across as a real
conversationalist in any case, which was maybe not too surprising, under the
circumstances.

She was more than three feet tall, and she didn’t have a
flat head, even though her forehead did slope back pretty radically before it
disappeared into her bangs. Still, you had to think Dexy had found his ideal
woman, the way he was carrying on.

She did look sort of cute, if you didn’t look too closely.
She wore a frilly white blouse tucked neady into a short denim skirt and her
hair was tied back in a pony-tail with a big white bow ribbon. She could’ve
passed for a student, if you ignored the metallic sparkle stuck all over her
eyelids and the spike heels with the straps crossed over and coming halfway up
her calves. And if you didn’t look too closely at her face.

Dexy was telling us about Thai women and dentists, and
other mysteries of this life. “These Thai dentists don’t know their business,
and that’s a plain fact. I send my little buddy, here, on three visits to this
dentist.
Three.
He X-rays her, stuffs her mouth with plaster and makes a
kind of statue of the inside of her mouth she gets to take home, and then
charges me just about as much as Smokin’ Sal’s take-away fee. I ask you. And
then he tells me there’s nothing wrong with her bite. Now, you don’t gotta go
to dentist school to know that’s just plain bullshit.

“Half the girls in Thailand have bad bites, if you want to
know the truth.”

Dexy was down on girls who ground their teeth at night.

“I can’t sleep. And it makes me nervous. Goddammit. Why
don’t they get their teeth fixed? Of course then you got the dentists, they
don’t know their business — don’t know a bad bite from their own arse end.”

I was no dentist, myself, and no psychiatrist either, but
I had an idea #37’s problem might lie elsewhere. I’d been watching her while
Dexy told us how it was, and she’d been chewing ice cubes — crunching them
right up like a little gravel crusher. Crunch, crunch, crunch. All the while
she wore an expression of cold, blank intensity on her face that chilled you
more than the remorseless ice-cube chewing. I wasn’t the only one that noticed;
it was hard not to notice. She chewed up the ice from her orange soda, and then
she fished the ice out of Dexy’s whiskey and processed that, too.