Bangkok Knights (27 page)

It looked as though the tool pusher was suffering acute
intimations of mortality, then, the way he had taken to carrying on with Dinky
Toy. Of course you could see she wasn’t exactly fighting him off. Being a
smooth operator and a man of no small parts, the oilman had already showed her
how he could open a beer bottle with his teeth, and then how he could drink the
whole beer straight from the neck, no hands, without pausing for breath. Now,
he claimed, he wanted to show her how to make a hero sandwich the like of which
had never been seen outside certain privileged circles in Lubbock, Texas. Quite swept away by the attentions of this dashing blade, Dinky Toy let him behind
the bar and back into the little kitchen.

Nobody really missed our toolpushing friend, but it wasn’t
much later that Dinky Toy came out of the kitchen and asked Leary if he could
join them in the back for a minute. Leary wasn’t gone five seconds before a
sudden booming noise made the fish man start and spill his beer. It was only
Leary laughing, of course, but a stranger couldn’t have known that. Next thing
Leary was out and bellowing at Eddie: “Oh, gosh. Haw! This is a job for you,
Eddie.” Leary looked delighted.

This time all of us crowded into the kitchen—even Big Toy,
who moved away from the tequila bottle for the first time all evening. The tool
pusher was bent over with his head in the refrigerator. Closer inspection
revealed his tongue was stuck to the metal lip of the freezer compartment His
ears were a bright red, but we couldn’t see his face very well.

Calm in crisis, telling everyone to move back a little,
please, for fear of inducing panic in the poor unfortunate, Eddie took control
of the situation. He asked Noi to boil a kettle of water, and told Big Toy to
see if there was any morphine in the first-aid kit.

At that moment the Texan made a kind of nasal sound —
something like “Uungh-aagh!”—and he jerked his head away from the fridge just
like a big trout throwing the hook. Anyone who was there that night and who
told you he didn’t wince is a liar. Of course there’s nothing that says you
can’ t wince and laugh at the same time. And Eddie had been right you
do
leave
a hefty patch of skin stuck to the metal. I’d forgotten how icky that was.

The toolpusher never did get his hero sandwich, and he
unceremoniously turned down Eddie’s very magnanimous offer of a Doorknob,
despite its no doubt palliative properties. He paid his bill and departed,
leaving Dinky Toy in a sulk. She had liked him, at least until he proved
himself a total idiot One way and another she let it be known she figured Eddie
had had something to do with it all — young romance nipped in the bud and
everything, that is.

The fish man bought a round for the house, and Eddie,
accepting this reformed skeptic’s compliments, beamed. “I told you; it’s human
nature. Hee, hee. They’re never going to learn.”

I dared say he was right I noticed at the same time that
Eddie was drinking a Mekhong soda, though he’d already had several beers and a
Doorknob. I had heard Eddie himself say that anyone who drinks Mekhong whiskey
and Singha beer in the same night is either suicidal or a moron.

I am collapsed out in a beach chair, drowsing, looking
at the girl draped across that big inner tube floating in the shallows. Looking
at her dark tanned skin, oily taut smoothly tight. Tight, almost, as the black
rubber skin of her inner tube. The fine long lean muscles of a go go dancer.
Her skin glistens, salt water beading on what I have a hunch is aromatic
coconut oil. Coconut oil always makes me salivate. This girl makes me salivate,
she is so self-conscious in the sun as she rocks gently in her inner tube,
eyeing me, pulling at her toes, pushing back her glossy black hair, squeezing
water from it. She pouts and points her toes at me. She has delicate feet
unusual in a Northeastern Thai bargirl. (She looks Northeastern.) Normally she
would have feet like hooves, unshod for generations, strong ugly Lamarckian feet
evolved by peasant children of the soil. But these dark brown feet pointing at
me from the inner tube are gracile brown pink-soled appendages which nicely
finish her smooth fine-boned legs. She rolls over on her tummy, the inner tube
bucking and rearing; she clutches and squirms and writhes back into control of
her nautical steed, presenting two gleaming oily globes of delectable flesh
embellished by a lime-green string bikini, lime-green against warm brown
cinnamon which I know at a range of thirty feet is redolent of coconut oil
simmered in the sun and I simmer and salivate and have warm earthy thoughts
while the lime-green of her swimsuit and the happy wholesome youth of her smile
and teasing eyes make me think of cold lime sherbet, sweet frosty warm things
and now I hunger for her, but I also think of Sunantha who is not here. The
girl in the inner tube is looking back at me over her shoulder and grinning.
She kicks her legs with languid allure, andV m sure I can smell coconut oil.

“Dink, dink, dink. All the time dink too much,” Sunantha
had been saying. I’d felt a dull resentment that might easily have flamed into
hot words, had I not felt so subdued by the hard business of continuing to
exist at all, never mind getting into a fight. Wedged like a refugee into that
ridiculous seat on that crummy bus.

The talcum powder Sunantha used after my bath was some new
mentholated stuff she’d bought at the market. About a kilo of it, dead cheap. A
novel sensation, it had been — sort of a cool-hot tingling. One could
conceivably have called it refreshing. But the tingling had not gone away. In
fact, it seemed to me it was getting more pronounced, if anything. At least in
certain areas. Actually, if you were to have asked me right then to report on
the current status of this new sensation, I would* ve told you my fucking balls
were on fire. There you go. And Sunantha claimed to have spent three years as a
nurse.

“This bus good. Is
cheap.
Why you want to spend
money? No need. Air-condition bus too expensive.”

Traveling between towns in Thailand, you find a variety of
vehicles at your disposal. Westerners, however, almost always use the train or
an air-conditioned tour bus. Not only are the latter two modes of transport
fast and cool, they have also been designed with the possibility in mind that
some people might be more than 5’4” tall. Someone like myself, for example, at
6’2”, is able to find room for his legs, so long as the passenger ahead does
not recline his seat.

But this fine morning I was not on a train or a nice
air-conditioned tour bus. I was on a
roht doysahn.
The fare on one of
these buses was half of what it’d cost you on a tour bus. Big deal. Half of
just about nothing was just about nothing.

“You say you want to sail, you want to play windsurf; but
you never go since I meet you. All the time dink.”

”Drink”
I said. “Rr.
Drink.
Jesus Christ.
Rrr”

How I’d allowed myself to be led onto one of these
instruments of gruesome discomfort, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because I was
still semi-comatose. Maybe it was guilt. One thing was pretty clear, Sunantha
had the idea that a wee dose of discomfort this Saturday morning would be good
for my character.

“Don’t complain. This bus cheap; and you always say we
spend money too much. Thai people take this bus all the time.”

No doubt this was true, but I wanted to point out I was
the only individual on this infernal vehicle who by necessity had one knee
practically up under my chin, and the other leg out in the aisle where I had to
keep shifting it so people could visit up and down the length of the bus. There
was no air, even with all the windows open, and sweat had saturated my shirt
and was trickling through the waistband of my underwear. The bus wasn’t moving,
and the ceiling fans had not yet been turned on.

Bangkok was hot, that April. Very hot. And humid. The cool
season was merely a poignant memory, while the rainy season was still a
hopelessly long way away. The heat came down like a hammer. In the little lane
outside my house, the scrawny, mangy dogs slipped from shadow to shadow,
tongues lolling, avoiding the sunlight like vampires home late from a nocturnal
carouse. There was no respite, even after dark.

I’d been feeling out of sorts, lately, anyway. Sunantha
said she figured it was time to get out of town. Time for the beach. She told
me I’d had two or three too many hangovers this past month or so, for one
thing, and I should maybe stop boozing for a while. Here’ s a good idea, she
said: why didn’ 11 promise not to drink at the beach? And all next week, too,
come to that.

Unbelievable. We’d been hanging out together for more than
a year, but she’d never said a thing. Until now. Suddenly I was some kind of
alcoholic or something, and I should watch my drinking. Our relationship was
overdue for some review and maybe some redefinition, it occurred to me, by
Christ. It wasn’t like we were married, after all. After all.

It was funny, Sunantha said, that I kept complaining I
hadn’ t been sailing or windsurfing or anything since I’d met her. Like she was
to blame. But I spent all my time in bars and restaurants, when I wasn’t lying
abed complaining about the hangovers which ensued, together with the growing
paunch and general flabbiness of spirit which, she said, was causing me to
become less endearing than I could be at my best and so on and so forth.

I could see we’d have to have a talk about things, but I
didn’t feel up to it right at that time.

So let’s go to the beach, she said. She only got the
Sunday off work, but one day was better than none. We could take an early-morning
bus down to Pattaya, spend the day on Jomtien Beach, and come back up in the
evening.

In fact, the seaside sounded like a good idea to me. I
figured we could have our talk another time. So I said “Good idea”, and then I
went around to Boon Doc’ s on Saturday night and played six-five-four till all
hours with Big Toy, Leary, and Eddie Alder, and came home leglessly drunk. Just
for the hell of it, I guess. I didn’t really plan it that way.

Next morning, with an iron disregard for my protests and
promises of some other weekend to come,
definitely,
Sunantha hauled my
sodden carcass out of bed and forced me, quite prematurely, to confront the
damage several Kloster beers and an indeterminate quantity of Mekhong whiskey
had done to the delicate machinery of body and mind.

“Eat this!”

She’d fed me
khao torn,
rice porridge, with extra
garlic and two raw eggs; she’d massaged me from end to end, bathed me, balled
me, bathed me again, and sprinkled me all over with talcum powder.

Then she’d slipped into a loose batiked shift that tied up
behind her neck and clung to her curves rather appetizingly, never mind I had
one foot in the grave, the cheery reds and oranges glowing against her fine
skin. She tied her long black hair up in a pony tail with a piece of bright red
net fabric. She looked excellent in anything she wore.

And now we were at Ekamai bus station, sitting on the
Pattaya bus. At this early hour there was already a mob of Thais milling about,
youngsters, for the most part, waiting to embark for various points upcountry.
The Westerners would appear later, at a more civilized hour. Thais like to set
off early, before the heat of the day rises. So far as I was concerned,
however, there was no time before the heat of the day, that April, especially
with a hangover. I wanted air-conditioning. I craved air-conditioning. And I
needed a smoke. And some sleep. But I’d quit smoking, and sleep was going to be
out of the question, I figured.

“I brought the nail-clippers,” Sunantha informed me.

What relevance did nail-clippers have to a dying man, I
had to wonder; pretty well nothing had been further from my mind at that moment
than nail-clippers. Suddenly I felt a sharp object enter my ear, a particularly
jarring sensation, given my general state of being. The sharp object turned out
to be Sunantha’s fingernail.

“I’ll clean your ears tonight,” she said.

Great. Sure. Now everything was okay, now I had that to
look forward to. I found myself getting pissed off, and at the same time
ashamed that I was, for some reason. Which pissed me off even more. I was
conscious of Sunantha’s steady regard, conscious of her awareness I was out of
sorts, of her ongoing campaign to empathize completely, to merge her being with
mine, to possess me to an extent that weighed down like a vast heavy blanket of
guilt and dread.

I was smothering. When was this christly bus going to get
moving, anyway?

“Do you want a drink? Do you want me to call the boy?”

She couldn’t just leave me alone to come to terms with my
misery. If she could only learn to leave me alone. She just didn’t know when to
leave some distance between us. It was probably a cultural thing, I thought;
Thais simply don’t recognize the same need for privacy, for some private space
in which to be alone with oneself. Even when your self was bad company.

“I’m going to get a Coke,” she said. “Do you want something? A
Green Spot?”

“For Chrissakes, I’m okay; just leave me alone, okay?”

“A beer?”

Sure. Have a beer. Fail the test That’s what I
should’ve
done, I thought. Only I didn’t want a beer. I really only wanted to be left
alone to meditate on my sins.

The problem was this, I decided: she was warm and bright
and funny and pretty, but she didn’t have enough interests. She had
one
interest,
primarily, and that was me — my whereabouts and general welfare at any given
moment My fingernails, my ears, my mood, my drinking habits... If we were to
stay together and have kids, just the thought of which caused a great weight to
descend on me, the brunt of her interest would shift to the children, I supposed.