Bangkok Knights (18 page)

Lek and my friend both agreed with her; you want to get
someone who knows what he’s doing to fix this kind of problem. Using the wrong
hoodoo could be worse than doing nothing at all.

For lack of manifest spirits to worry about right at the
moment, we all stared apprehensively at the mask on the wall. In the dim light
from the lamps and the drifting smoke from our cigars, I thought I saw the lips
curl in a snarl even more fearsome. The power of suggestion, no doubt, together
with the magnificent old brandy Leary was serving that night.

Leary wanted to try an experiment; would the spirits
manifest themselves before a cheery gathering such as this one? He dimmed the
lights still further and turned off the stereo. “Listen,” he said.

There was nothing. Eddie giggled.

A few moments later, there was a sound. A footfall. And
another. Around the corner on the stairs from the hallway. Eddie didn’t giggle.
Child of the Enlightenment that he was, Eddie had his eyes bugged out like the
gunners’ turrets on a B29 bomber, as Leary was later to express it. The ladies,
meanwhile, were shrinking ever deeper into the upholstery.

Leary got to his feet, baseball bat in hand, and advanced
upon the hallway, every move eloquent of barely restrained mayhem.

Just then there was a whole series of alarming noises — of
things going bump in the night — of scrabbling, halting, slithering descent on
the stairway towards the hall. I’m sure it was only my imagination, but I
thought for a moment that Leary actually quailed.

”Hoo, hoo, hoo,” said Eddie, somewhat enigmatically, to my
mind. He picked up a wooden stool and held it high over his head. Maybe he
planned to knock himself out if things got too gruesome.

I would’ ve been happy to assist, but I was in the
clutches of three very skittish ladies, and couldn’t move.

Sinewy hands throttling the bat, powerful shoulders
hunched up with spring-loaded tension, Leary was a pretty impressive sight. In
fact, if a ghost was about to poke its face around the corner, I figured it was
even money the spook would be the one to faint.

There was a final thump, and suddenly, down at floor
level, something appeared; it moved... something weird... Leary jumped back and
raised the bat to swing. And there, flopping along all ears and low-slung
belly, was Dung, short little legs gallantly trying to convey him across the
shiny waxed floor. He was visibly chuffed with his success in getting down the
stairs all on his own.

Eddie put the stool down, no doubt relieved he wasn’ t
going to have to brain himself, after all. The ladies let go of me, and we all
had a good laugh. Dung lurched and waddled into the midst of this happy gang,
pleased to be the center of attention and figuring this might mean he’d finally
get fed.

It appeared that Nancy, tired from the day’s exertions,
had decided to have a nap before dinner, while Leary went out for more drinks.
Afraid of being alone in that house, she’d broken down and brought Dung in to
stand guard in the bedroom, for the first time ever, and then forgotten about
him.

We stayed up past 2:00 a.m., drinking and laughing and
dancing, and heard nothing else you could call unusual, unless you wanted to
count Eddie’s rendition of ‘Black Betty Bam Ba-lam’, accompanied by himself
beating on a wastebasket and blowing into the neck of an empty brandy bottle.

Maybe it was the latter phenomenon, or maybe it was just
that spooks didn’t care for boisterous parties — or perhaps the house had
simply finished subsiding — but after that evening there were few manifestations,
beyond the occasional moan and creak.

Nancy finally agreed to try sleeping there again, but only
when Leary promised he would see about getting some professional exorcists over
to do a proper job.

”You know, there
are
still strange noises, every so
often,” said Leary when I saw him the other day. “It’s kind of spooky. I’ll
tell you the truth, it doesn’t hurt to be on the safe side, and I’m just as
happy we’re getting the ghost-busters in.

“It’s like some guy said, some philosopher: Even if there isn’t
any really good evidence that God exists, a smart man is going to believe in
Him anyway. It’s like laying off your bets, you see. You drop dead and there’s
no God, and you’ve lost nothing; on the other hand, you drop dead and you find
there
is
a God, and He says * Believers in through this way’, and you’re
smelling of roses. Covering your bases, it’s called.

“And I’ve got the same attitude towards this getting
exorcised. That’s right. But like I say, it doesn’ t hurt to be on the safe
side, and if it isn’t a spook, maybe it’s termites or something, and on Monday
I’ve got the bug-boys coming around for a look, as well.”

Ernest and I sat in the noodle shop — little more than a
corrugated iron and scrap-timber shanty, open on three sides; we were sharing a
large bottle of beer and a plate of
naem sot,
the fiery fermented
Chiangmai pork sausage. It was 3:00 in the afternoon. Ernest was waiting to
meet Noi, his fiancee, who was off getting the results of her AIDS test.

I had been aware of the deepening gloom as an internal
phenomenon, as a mood. But now the sky abruptly darkened to black and the air
grew still, breathless with suspense. A quick splatter of fat raindrops
exploded on the street—a warning shot On the concrete wall of the building
opposite, several small lizards scuttled for cover up under the eaves, and a
sudden, furious gust of wind ran a wheeled parking barrier across the adjacent
lot, crashing it into a parked car. Another pause, and then the sky abruptly
descended in great leaden sheets.

We hadn’ t really planned to have a second beer but we
were, after all, trapped. Make the best of things. Noi would certainly be late;
she’d have to wait till the rain slackened off, and, in the monsoon season in Bangkok, that would probably be another hour yet.

We sat just under cover from the downpour, and the din of
wind-driven rain masked the roar and racket of traffic. Soon, the flow of
vehicles slowed to a faltering wallow of great metal beasts wheezing and
honking their frustration. Within half an hour we’d ordered a third bottle, the
better to enjoy the freshening air, the relative cool. We had our feet up on
little metal stools; a torrent some inches deep washed through the cafe,
carrying, among other things we noticed, an empty Lipovitan bottle and a
plastic sandal. The waitresses were cheerful, glad of the break in their
routine. Barefoot, sarongs hiked up between their legs, they laughed and
bantered with those of us customers marooned by the storm.

“Are you going for a test as well?” I’d asked Ernest.

“Hell, no! There’s no reason at all to think I might have
AIDS. That’s whatl toldNoi. Christ! I’m not a homosexual. I’m not a
hemophiliac, a heroin addict, or a Haitian. I don’t screw around. I don’t take
bargirls home, especially since I met Noi. If I’ve got AIDS, I told her, then
that’s really bad luck — that’s like bad luck on the magnitude of somebody
getting hit by a meteorite or bitten by a rabid platypus. If I’ve got AIDS, I
told her, then I got it from
her,
and that would be some kind of
miracle, wouldn’t it, since she says she’s never slept with any other man in
her life. Jesus Christ!”

If you could believe the authorities, there were fewer
than a hundred people in all of Thailand who’d been infected with the virus thus
far. It would’ve been bad luck even for one of those sporting gentlemen who
frequented the massage parlors. That’s if you could believe the authorities; it
would be a shame to spoil the tourist trade, after all.

“Anyway, what good would it do to have a test supposing
you
did
have AIDS? Like I told her, we’ve been together almost a year,
now, and if I’ve got it, then she’s got it. So then we find out we’ve got it,
what are we going to do? First off, I’m going to get deported, and it’s no more
Ernest-and-Noi-what-a-sweet-couple. Then we wait to die, and we can’t even
comfort each other, living on different continents the way we’d be.”

“You told her all this?”

“Oh, yeah. And she cried and wailed ‘Oh, no’ and said
she’d never let me go. And then she went ahead and took the test.”

And now she had gone to get the results.

It wasn’t even as though there was anything wrong with
her, Ernest told me. It was nothing but the power of suggestion. Her
suggestibility and the irresponsibility of the authorities in publicizing AIDS
in the way they had.

“Superstition. That’s all it is, basically,” Ernest told
me. “I’m
a farang
and us
farang
brought the disease to Thailand. The government has called it a foreigners’ disease, and Noi has been sleeping
with a foreigner, which bothers her anyway, deep down on some level, since
she’s a ‘nice’ girl; and consequently she has AIDS because she’s practically
supposed
to have the blasted thing. I guess. I really don’t know how it works. She’s
just about the closest thing to a Roman Catholic you’re ever going to find in a
Buddhist. It’s nothing but some kind of guilt trip.”

Ernest looked at his watch and then looked out through the
deluge at the traffic. All that was moving by now were the motorcycles. They
were coming up on the sidewalks, out of the deeper torrent on the street,
weaving past the few pedestrians who were wading along, shoes in hand, trousers
rolled up to the knees.

Ernest sipped earnestly from his glass, and shook his
head. “Look at that: not one of them’s got an umbrella. That’s Thais for you.
And here it is the rainy season.

“They probably figure if you’re wearing an amulet, or
you’ve got a couple of lucky tattoos, then no problem. Or maybe their
fortune-tellers told them they wouldn’t get wet. That’s most likely it.”

Needless to say, Ernest had his umbrella with him. I’d
forgotten mine. I guess I’d been in Thailand longer than he had; maybe I was
going native. Anyway, who needed umbrellas when you had noodle shops and cold
beer?

“She wakes me up in the middle of the night, and she
announces ‘Ernest, I’ve got AIDS.’ She’s been crying, because, she says, she
doesn’t want to die, and she’d wanted to live a long and happy life with me and
have children, especially a little boy just like me, just like how I used to
be. She almost had me crying myself, except I was so pissed off she’d woken me
up to lay this nonsense on me.

“’How do you know you’ve got AIDS?’ I ask her.

“’I just
know”’
she says. “’I can
feel
it.’

”To hell with it”, Ernest said, and he ordered another beer.
Usually he was a very moderate drinker.

What about Sunantha?” he asked me. “Does she worry about
AIDS?”

Sunantha was
my
proper Thai ladyfriend. So far as I
could tell, she had no negative feelings at all about our relationship, no
matter how well-bred she was. I was the one that carried the burden of any
guilt involved.

Sunantha wanted to get married — quite properly, some
might say, after a year of fairly intimate association with yours truly. And
not out of any guilt, but mostly because we could save money. If she were to
give up her apartment, for one thing, she could give that rent money to me; we
could share my rent. Our rent. But I’d insisted we keep our separate places, no
matter she used her joint mainly as a storehouse for her extensive wardrobe.

Anyway, it wasn’t just the money—she
wanted
to. And
she thought I should want to; didn’t I want a nice baby boy? Soon I’d be too
old, she told me, thereby not endearing herself to me a lot. I knew I was too
young
to get married, and it irritated me she didn’t recognize this. I wasn’t
ready. I didn’t know how much longer I wanted to stay in Thailand. As a free-lance writer I didn’t make enough money. My life prospects were too uncertain,
right now, to think of starting families. Anyway, the whole idea made me very nervous.
And there was the problem of cultural conflicts, as well.

“No,” I told Ernest. “She’s never said anything about AIDS
tests.”

The rain had let up, but the waters in the cafe had not
yet subsided to the point where you could put your feet down again.

“Shouldn’t you be going?” I asked.

“She’ll be late,” he said. “She’d be late even if there
was no rain. Thais are always late.”

“Go easy on her,” I suggested. “Noi’s a fine lady. She
probably just isn’t feeling too well. Maybe a touch of the ‘flu. Give her a
break; you’ve never gotten upset, yourself — acted a little screwy?

“And she’s in a difficult position, you said so yourself:
a proper young Thai lady living with a foreigner? It’s a good thing you guys
are finally getting married.”

I meant it, too. Noi was a sweetheart, and Ernest was
definitely the marrying type. Not what I’d want to call ‘staid’, exactly, but
kind of sober and responsible; a no-nonsense fellow, resourceful and
down-to-earth. He made a fine rural development specialist for an international
organization in Bangkok, and he’d make an excellent husband and father. A rare
bird, in any social circle I was part of.

“We’re getting married, I guess. Right. But sometimes I
have to wonder. About the children, I mean. What kind of guff is she going to
fill
their
heads with?”

This was serious. Never had I heard anything but unalloyed
praise from Ernest on the subject of Noi. “What kind of guff are you talking
about?” I inquired.

“Her superstition. Her gullibility about almost anything
you want to mention. Sometimes I wonder if we’re living on the same planet.”

“For instance?” I asked him.

“For instance: you know how you go to a doctor in
Thailand, and he gives you six different-colored pills, no matter what’s wrong
with you — not always the same six colors, that’s why they have to go to
medical school, to know which color combination is good for which problem—and
how, if you’ ve got any sense at all, you throw away everything except the
aspirin and maybe the turquoise ones, ‘cause they’re so pretty? Yeah? Well, Noi
takes ‘em all, and then asks for more, why didn’t she get any of those little
green ones, this time, she wants to know?