Bangkok Knights (17 page)

As we were leaving, Mu called to us: “Hey, what’s another
word for ‘generous’?” She was frowning thoughtfully and chewing on her pen.

“’Gullible’,” said Eddie. “G-U-L-L-I-B-L-E. Or
‘softheaded’. Either one.”

At Skipjacks Ann spotted me before I saw her, and she came
right over to join us at our table. Not a bad joint, this establishment
featured hand-lettered signs advertising greasy-spoon-style farang food and
waitresses dolled up in frilly dresses that almost covered their knees. They
all had legs like racehorses. There were several customers sitting about the
place drinking beer and joshing with the girls. Nice soft music, and lots of
air-conditioning. Quite the little oasis — a quiet retreat from the hustle and
hassle out on the street. I ordered a hot roast beef sandwich, something I
hadn’t had in years. Lots of thick gravy, and french fries on the side.

I’d introduced Ann and Eddie, and they were having a nice
chat about Ronald. Eddie finally got around to mentioning he had a message from
that very individual.

“He didn’t write
me”
said Ann with a pretty pout.

“Well, he wanted this news to be kind of private, you see...
Ah, he wanted to tell you he’s... urn... sick.”

“Sick? Oh, my poor Ronald from Riyadh. What’s wrong?”

Skipjacks was fairly quiet anyway, but just at this moment
one of those strange hushes fell over the place; everyone sort of paused to
reflect on life’s rich pageant all at the same time. Right in the middle of
this hush, Eddie said: “He’s sick. You know—
sick”
And he waggled his
eyebrows meaningfully. The very soul of discretion, he elaborated further by
flicking the most fleeting of glances towards his lap.

Enlightenment abruptly dawned. Ann reared back and shrieked:
“V.D.? You mean he has V.D.!?”

“Urn,” he said. “Yes. Rather.”

Everyone in Skipjacks was by now taking a certain amount of
interest in the conversation.

“V.D?” she went on in a similar vein, the decibel level
rising slightly, if anything. It was as though she hoped she’d misunderstood,
and what Ronald really had was some V.O. or a V2, or something. But such was
not the case.

“Well, he didn’t get it from me! I don’t
have V.D.
,”
she hollered quite categorically, still leaving open the possibility, one had
to understand, that she might have had some V.O.

I offered a sickly smile to our audience, and indicated to
one of the girls we could probably use some more beer.

There were at least two gentlemen in there, I noted, who
had edged closer and who were now taking a very intently serious interest in
the proceedings. Chances are they were rooting for it to be V.O. that she had.

Having no first-hand knowledge of these matters, and
frankly referring only to hearsay, I suggested that you couldn’t always tell; I
meant to say there weren’t always symptoms. You know — Typhoid Mary, and all
that.

After we’d calmed her down a bit, talking softly and
buying her colas, she agreed maybe she should check with a doctor. But did
Ronald realize how expensive medical advice was? Not to mention rent and
clothing and getting enough to eat. Ann decided she’d better send him another
letter posthaste and get a few things sorted out.

In the spirit of good fellowship, and feeling somewhat
responsible, on Ronald’s behalf, for the demure Miss Ann with the legs like a
racehorse, we helped her compose the draft communication. Not being experienced
scribes, we really made only a few suggestions; this rough effort was to go to
Mu at Fancy That for whatever refinements and embellishments she would deem
advisable.

Ann dictated the general outlines of what she needed,
while Eddie and I collaborated on rendering this in English prose. First of
all, Ronald had to realize that she loved him too much, even if he was sick
with a foul disease. (Eddie must take credit for the phrase ‘foul disease’.)
Furthermore, he should know that she missed him and hoped he’d get better soon,
and she was going to kill him when she saw him again. It had to be one of those
Shaky Jake’s girls that was responsible for his present delicate condition, and
she believed this would show him the error of his ways and the value of
constancy. (Eddie told me ‘delicate condition’ was used conventionally to refer
to pregnancy; I said I didn’t care, I liked the phrase, and Ronald would know
what we meant, anyway.) For Ann’s part, constancy was an expensive virtue, and
medical bills were, too. Expensive, that is. Knowing that Ronald was such a
generous, not to say gullible, dear sweet big nitwit, it went without saying
that his next letter to her should include negotiable earnest of his
affections, and tangible evidence his sweet words were not just sweet words,
after all.

We all three of us went on in this way for some time, with
Eddie even trying his hand at singing some romantic doggerel of his own
composition before it was over.

Given the number of drinks we went through before
appending “Love you more than words can pay” to the draft of Ann’s letter, it
might not have been surprising if this billet-doux included errors of both
content and intent, not to mention spelling mistakes and avant-garde syntax.

No problem, however; Eddie and I could wend our bleary
ways home with easy conscience, knowing that Mu the Scribe would edit the
manuscript ere it winged its way to Riyadh. Ronald would get the message. Or so
we hoped.

“Ghosts? Well, I’m not exactly going to say I
don’t
believe
in them. No, there are stranger darn things in this life, I can tell you. That’s
right.
Gosh. You only have to look back Stateside; I can tell you
stories from Alabama, never mind your Far Friggin’ East.”

Leary normally seasoned his talk with salt (gosh) and
pepper (darn), reserving the mustard (frigging) for especially pungent observations.
At the same time, however, he was a sucker for a nicely alliterative turn of
phrase, and might occasionally add a friggin’ on purely stylistic grounds.

“Anyhow, I don’t care if there are no ghosts or not; as
long as Nance
believes
there are ghosts it amounts to the same thing,
because I ain’t gonna get any gosh-darned sleep.”

Leary and his fiancee Nancy had recently moved into a
lovely house on a quiet
soi
off Sukhumvit Road. They liked almost
everything about the place: it was bright and airy; it combined the charm of
traditional Thai teak architecture with all the modern conveniences, such as an
electric oven big enough for Thanksgiving turkeys and air-conditioning
efficient enough to have Nancy complaining about the cold all the time. They had
a large garden, complete with enough greenery to hide a small herd of elephants
and maybe a band of communist insurgents, as well.

Leary was pretty sure there were no elephants or
insurgents, he told us, but there might be things more annoying than that at
large. They ‘d been in the house for about a month when they started hearing
peculiar noises, usually late in the evening. First, there had been soft creaks
and moans—the kind of thing Leary had put down to wind and the natural settling
of a wooden building in Bangkok. Nancy hadn’t been entirely convinced.
Singaporean Chinese, she shared with many people in Asia a healthy respect for
the spirits of the departed.

Then, one night, they heard footsteps on the stairway.
Leary had to agree with Nancy on this point — there had been footsteps, no
question. And when he went out to check, expecting to find the maid or, at
worst, a burglar, he found nothing. He went into the maid’s room and determined
that she’d been asleep. He went all through the house and went out into the
yard to check on Dung, the dog, who’d also been asleep. Nary a sound did he
hear, nor an intruder did he see. He led old Dung all around, and Dung saw
nothing worth remarking upon, either. By the time he went back to bed, he’d
almost convinced himself it’d been their imaginations; something that Nancy had dreamed up which he’d then fallen victim to because of sleepiness and the power
of suggestion.

Later that same night, they’d been awakened by the sound
of a dull, rhythmic thumping downstairs, followed by a low moan.

“That was the end of it,” said Leary. “No more sleep that
night. Nancy was all for getting out of there right then and heading for a
hotel. She was spooked, and make no mistake. Gosh. I had to just about pry her
offa me so I could go downstairs for another look. This time I took a baseball
bat.”

If you’d asked anybody who knew him how Leary would handle
an exorcism, they probably would’ve told you “With a baseball bat.”

“Given all the things in this world it could be, I had my
money on a lot of stuff before ghosts. There were prowlers and there were
boyfriends of maids, for just two examples. The next day we had a talk with
Nid. The only result of that was the household now had two darned females who
weren’t ever going to sleep again, and Nid was thinking maybe this was a good
time to go upcountry for a while and visit the folks.”

Nancy wanted to bring in some experts, Leary told me. She
said she had no idea how to deal with ghosts, but she was sure they had ghosts,
and she knew that was bad news and no job for amateurs with baseball bats.

“I reckoned we had a few things to try still before we got
around to the mumbo-jumbo,” Leary said. “I was pretty sure, now, we could rule
out Nid or any boyfriend; so Nance and I checked the whole house over for
cracks in the plaster or any other sign the house was settling. I even tested
the place all over with a spirit level. Nid thought the spirit level was some
kind of ghost-bustin’ apparatus, I think, because she wanted to use it in her
room as well. Truth was, I kinda hoped it
would
lay some spirits to
rest, but the gosh-darned house turned out to be so level you could’ ve shot
pool on the floor. So that wasn’t it.

“And the noises kept on, night after night By now Nance
and the maid had no doubt what we were up against. In my mind, though, prowlers
were the next best bet. Thing is, if they’re burglars, they sure are having a
gosh-darned hard time deciding just what it is they want to steal, because
nothing’s gone missing. On top of that, they’d have to know things about
stealth that’d baffle Davy Crockett. Gosh, I’ve set up every kind of ambush and
trap you could think of.

“One night I decided to spend some time in the yard, and
kind of stake out the place. Nance told me there was no way she was going to
stay in the house alone. Good gosh, I told her, you can take Dung inside for
company. But Nance won’ t have dogs in the house, and what good was a sleepy
old mutt against ghosts anyway?”

Leary said he told Nancy the maid was there as well, and
she told him that wasn’t the case, because the maid had developed pressing
family business upcountry, and Nancy, herself, was going to stay with Lek and
Eddie, and Leary could stay and be friggin’ haunted if he wanted to. “Only she
didn’t say friggin’”, Leary added.

Leary said he had rigged tripwires both inside and outside
the house, connecting them to elephant bells and such-like, so unless you were
a ghost, you were going to scare hell out of yourself if you tried tiptoeing
around the place in the dark.

Leary had blacked his face with charcoal, donned dark
clothing, and hunkered down in the jungle outside the house, baseball bat at
hand, prepared for anything.

“Dung slept loyally by my side right through it all. The
mosquitoes and the gosh-darned boredom and the fact I hadn’ t slept it seemed
like in weeks kind of wore me down a bit I had to keep drinking Krathingdaeng,
that Red Bull tonic, to stay awake, and I kept chasing that with brandy to take
the taste of the tonic away. I finally fell asleep, despite the Krathingdaeng.
I woke up later with something like a hangover, tripped over one of my own
wires, and wound up none the wiser for the whole friggin’ experience.”

Leary figured he’d about run out of rational recourses.
His last stand was going to be an exorcism party, as he told me, and he wanted
myself and my girlfriend, as well as Eddie and Lek to come over the next
evening for dinner and drinks.

“I’ve been alone in that darned house for a week, now. Any
excuse for a party, anyway, and Nance might feel better about the place if she
can have a few laughs there with some friends around.”

Furthermore, he told me, maybe somebody would think of
something he hadn’t. He was gosh-darned if he was going to leave that house
just because of some spooky noises.

*

It was a great meal; Nancy had spent the better part of
the day preparing, as Leary put it, a friggin’ feast fit to make a ghost feel
hungry.

After dinner we sat around with coffee and brandy and
Leary outlined the history of those mysterious events once more, with Nancy adding dramatic embellishments that had Eddie’s Lek and my friend sticking fairly
close and trying not to turn their backs on any direction at all. Eddie uttered
some eerie sounds and made fangs of his forefingers, and everybody told him to
shut up.

I noticed there were a couple of new wall ornaments since
my last visit: a masterfully carved wooden mask with glaring ivory eyes and a
scowl full of ivory teeth was mounted over an old bone-handled knife in a
wooden scabbard. The latter item, upon closer inspection, proved to be heavily
incised with Khmer script.

”Leary got them in the amulet market,” Nancy said. “The
mask is Chinese.”

“Leary?” said Eddie. “Leary bought them? Have you got some
silver bullets, Leary, my man; or how about a garland of garlic? Hoo, haw.”

Leary gave him a black look, one seconded by Lek.

The vendor had told Leary these objects were big magic, a
proof against all but your most malign spirits.

“Leary always scolds me for buying medicine without
getting proper medical advice,” said Nancy. “Then what does
he
do?”