Bangkok Knights (8 page)

N umber Thirty-Seven came out of her shell for a moment to
say something to Big Toy, who then served the kid up a bowl of fresh ice-cubes.
Right away, she was at them like they were her favorite
khanom,
the
tastiest candies you could ever imagine. No, that’s not quite right, because
she didn’t look like she was enjoying them. But she didn’ t stop, except now
and then, when Dexy would turn to her and ask “Ain’t that right, you little
honey?” and she’d show him a tight smile that was as warm as ice, as pleasant
as grinding teeth.

I thought I could hear Eddie’s teeth grinding, as well,
though it might’ve only been my imagination. He’d been listening to Dexy’s
exposition in spite of himself. Given his attitude towards this expert on
oilrigs and women, you’d have expected to find Eddie at the far end of the
room; but there he was, practically hanging on Dexy’s every word. It was
probably the same impulse that leads a person to probe a sore tooth, no matter
how much you know it’s going to hurt.

Eddie said something to #37 in Thai, asked where she was
from, where her family was. That stopped her for a minute, this
farang
  speaking
Thai and asking her nice questions, polite as can be, just like she was a
person and everything. For a minute she did seem like a little kid; she stopped
chewing ice and gave Eddie what could’ ve passed for a real smile, though it
was kind of sad-looking. Only for a moment. Then she glanced at Dexy and
recollected herself.

“Sexy man,” she said to Eddie, and sniggered. Her smile
had turned purely ugly.

”Hey. What’d you say to her? Huh?” Dexy appeared
consternated altogether out of proportion to the circumstances. I guess it was
because he felt at a disadvantage, not speaking more than the most basic
Cathouse Thai.

“Nothing,” replied Eddie, with a smirk as ugly in its own
way as #37’s smile. “Only telling her what a prince you were; what’d you
think?”

Dexy took a long, hard look at Eddie, and momentarily the
oilman’s bluff, hearty persona dropped away, and you caught a glimpse of
something starkly dangerous. Then he roared with laughter, and turned back to
the bar. “Big Toy, let’s have a drink, goddammit; orange pop for my friend,
here, another one of these here for me, and another tequila for yourself. And
you better give Eddie a beer.”

He turned around again, but Eddie had already moved away
to the other end of the room, where Leary was talking to some guys.

“Oh, well, yeah. Just a couple, you know,” Leary was
saying. “Gosh-darned things hardly cost anything at all, anyway. Little bit of
food, some clothes. Like that. Maybe look after their schooling.”

Seemed he was talking about kids — slum children who’d
been orphaned or else just abandoned. Some kind of foster-parent program that Nancy had gotten involved with. She’d had Leary convince Doc he should host a special night
at Boon Doc’s to help her off-load some needy children. Doc had said he would,
sort of in lieu of taking on a kid or two himself, since it was already all he
could do to maintain his own extended association of perennially needy kinfolk.

But Doc still hadn’t turned up, and Leary had probably
recognized that soon everybody would be long beyond thinking about child
adoption, they were having such a good time. So he’d broached the subject
himself, a fairly heroic action for this notoriously voluble advocate of
Leary’s Law.

Leary had already been embarrassed by his own admission
that he and Nancy were sponsoring two of these waifs. Embarrassed by his
embarrassment, then, he compensated by broadcasting the following directive in
his best Moses voice, scowling at his audience all the while: “You all want to
do your bit, and help out, here. Darn it These kids got every right to a
friggin’ life just like you do, and all they need is some of your spare change;
it’ll make the difference between a life worth living and years of nothing but
misery. C’ mon. Gosh, you don’t even need to have them underfoot; all you have
to do is sign one of these little papers, here, and write a pitiful little
check once a month. Or you can do it all in one lump sum — it’s hardly anything
at all—and set up a kind of trust for the tyke, and not be bothered any more.
Here — we got lots of these papers behind the bar, here. C’mon, gosh-darn it.”

Leary had turned quite florid with his own eloquence, and
he was sweating profusely. He grabbed a fresh drink and rubbed the icy glass
back and forth across his fevered brow before downing it in one go and slamming
it back on the bar. He wiped at his face with a hanky and glared at everybody
within range.

Meanwhile, Dexy had sashayed over to see what was
happening.

Leary pointed a finger at him and boomed, “Dexy, you’re
going to take one of these kids, you hear me? Nothing else you ever done in
your life is any credit to you, you got to be the first to admit that. Just
this once you’re gonna do the right thing.”

“You can go to hell, old buddy. I got enough on my plate
without taking care of some rug-rat You want to have kids, a bunch of rug-rats,
then you go ahead. But you should have your own. You adopt one of these here
poor trash, you don’t know what you’re getting. Yuh know what I mean? They
could be sick, and you might not know it. It could be the genes, you know. They
could have genes — bad ones, I mean.”

This time I was sure I could hear Eddie grinding his
teeth.

“You can look on it like a kind of tax,” Leary persisted.
“It’s not like you gotta bring’ em home with you—they got other people to look
after them. No, you just cough up a little bit of money, and that’s all; then
you can sit back and collect all the good gosh-darned karma and never change a
diaper or nothing. It’s not like it’s going to bust you, Dexworth. You spend
more’n that on friggin’ beer, in a good month.”

Dexy spoke, and you suddenly got a vision of what it
would’ve been like if
two
Moseses had come down from the mountain. “Taxes?
You’re talkin’ to me about
taxes!
I pay more taxes on whiskey and beer
in a month than your average Thai pays in income taxes in a goddammed year.
Don’t talk to me about taxes. You know how much tax there is on a bottle of
beer in this country?”

“Friggin’ right — they should build a monument to you,
Dexy. Build friggin’ public monuments to the lot of us, the amount of tax we’re
paying, the booze we take care of.” Leary didn’t usually wax sarcastic, but
this was one of those times, probably.

Dexy didn’t notice, though. Caught up, no doubt, in a fit
of altruistic fervor, he ordered a round for the house, thereby adding
significantly to both the government coffers and the general welfare, according
to his latest insight.

“And all the money you give your girls, Dexy — I guess
that’s another principled attempt to redistribute the wealth, right? Out of the
goodness of your heart and all?” Now Eddie was trying his hand at sarcasm,
though maybe a shade heavy-handedly.

Leary took up the line of attack anyway: “Friggin’ right.
The amount of money you lay out only on women in your month off you could put
three kids through university, here in Thailand.”

“Listen here,” Dexy demanded. “You can’t take care of ‘em
all, can you? It’s just like all the beggars everywhere. It don’t do no good to
give ‘em anything. And it’s the same with these slum kids you’re talking about.
You start giving them money, you’re just encouraging them, yuh know what I
mean? They’ll just keep makingmore ‘n’ more little kids and leaving them on doorsteps,
and they won’ t give a hoot because they’ 11 know people like you’ s going to
take care of them, so no problem, right? Next thing you know, the place is
crawling with these poor trash folk, they don’t know how to look after
themselves, can’t do a lick of work, only make more babies.

“Same thing back Stateside, these days. Now my man
Reagan’s leaving, God knows what’s going to happen, you get some liberal
do-gooder in there.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Dexy hastened to assure the
assembly. “Leary here is a working man just like you and me, got his head
screwed on straight. But he’s hooked up with this lady — none finer, don’t get
me wrong — but Nancy’s basically a do-gooder, like a lot of these broads.
You’re not careful, you’re trying to keep them sweet, they’ll have you doing
all sorts of damn-fool things.

“Now don’t get me wrong, Leary — you know I got every
respect for you, but that’ s the way I feel. It’s what happens when you listen
to these broads. Ladies.”

Dexy had special license to speak to Leary this way, I
guess. And who knows? Maybe Leary didn’t think what Dexy had said was utter
crap, though of course it was.

All you’ d have had to do was ask Eddie; he was back
probing at the tooth, figuratively speaking, picking at the wound, clearly
wanting to say something himself and at the same time not wanting to say it.
Once again, however, prudence lost out.

“What about you, Dexy? Did your folks leave you on a
doorstep? I’ll bet they did; at least if they had any sense they did. And I’ll
bet they never looked back.”

A couple of the guys laughed, and then they stopped. You
could see something was wrong. Dexy wasn’t laughing — here he’d just been
sorely insulted, and he wasn’t laughing. Nor was he coming back with twice as
good as he’d received. Leary hadn’ t laughed either, in fact, his face was
mostly registering grim concern.

Dexy had gone entirely expressionless, quiet. Then he
spoke. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” he said as, very deliberately, he
reached out and dumped his glass of whiskey and soda over Eddie’s head.

Eddie didn’t even move. He seemed spellbound as the
whiskey dripped down through his hair. Then he swung at Dexy.

Eddie must’ve confused right with might. He did make a
serious error in judgment, anyway. For not only was Dexy without peer as a
cusser and profaner of all things sacred, he turned out to be more than just
okay as a streetfighter. Leary made a move to intervene, and I thought about
making a move, but the whole thing was over in a matter of seconds. Eddie had
taken a left to the jaw, a piledriver right to the midsection, and an uppercut
to the face as he was doubling up in the way one tends to do under those
circumstances.

Leary stepped in to veto any further hostilities as Eddie
was sliding down the front of the bar, taking a bar-stool with him, and just as
Dexy was lifting a boot As Leary explained later, in Dexy’s defense, Dexy
wasn’t really going to put the boot in; it was only reflex. If Dexy had really
wanted to hurt Eddie, after all, he wouldn’t have been as gentle as he’d been
from the outset

And after all it was Dexy who saved Eddie from #37’s
attack. At some point during the altercation, this latter item had appeared
behind Dexy, so interested she’d left off crunching ice cubes, and when Eddie
went down, she went right in, a spike heel raised high with lethal intent, eyes
glittering with vicious excitement. Dexy, one arm still in Leary’ s grip,
grabbed her with his free hand and yanked her back. #37’s laugh was like
fingernails on a blackboard, and hectic spots of red stood out in her cheeks.

But you couldn’t really have described Eddie as a serious
contender, even if you left #37 out of the equation. And this should have been
no surprise to Eddie; after all, Dexy had made his way in life through the
ranks of oilrig roughnecks and barroom brawlers on three continents, while
Eddie had spent the last several years mostly finding ways to avoid having to
paint the attic of the Cheri-Tone Guesthouse and making notes towards the Great
Expatriate Novel.

The party wound down quickly from this point. Dexy had to
give #37 a little slap to bring her around to what passed for her senses. Then
he offered Eddie his hand, but Eddie was in an unforgiving mood.

Dexy and his friend left without adopting any slum kids.
Dexy had been right — he did have enough on his plate already, at least if he
was planning on any further association with the intriguing Miss Thirty-seven
from Smokin’ Sal’s Saloon.

Eddie didn’t adopt anybody, either, but he’d been pretty
well distracted by the events of that evening, and could probably be forgiven
if his earlier intention to take on a foster child was forgotten in the course
of things.

Several of us did allow Leary to browbeat us into doing
good, however, and between us we signed up for any number of waifs. So the
evening was a fair success, at least in that respect.

And Sue-wang seemed inseparable from a nice young man in
the import-export trade, which was nice for her. Nid and Noi, on the other
hand, were both sick, taking it in turns to monopolize the toilet, and this was
making life somewhat uncomfortable for the rest of us.

Keeow and Boom had both disappeared.

Big Toy was awash in tequila, and she’d had to turn over
the bridge, to relinquish command of the cash to Dinky Toy, who resented this
mightily, since she’d grown quite fond of a fellow from the Aussie Embassy
who’d wandered in off the street, and it was very hard to concentrate on these
two matters of business at the same time.

I left at 1:00.

Doc never did show up, which everyone agreed was very strange.

“You gotta understand Dexy’s position.” Or so Leary was
trying to claim.

It was a week after the Orphan Party, and I’d dropped in
at Boon Doc’s to see how things were going. The joint was empty. There was
Leary, Big Toy, Dinky Toy, and myself. A couple of the other girls were curled
up asleep in the booths along the wall.

“Dexy was abandoned by his momma, though you don’t have to
tell him I told you so. But she didn’t leave him on no doorstep; she left him
up an alley behind some trash cans to die. Somebody found him there; heard him
crying.”

Leary wiped at the sweat on his face and cast a black look
in the direction of the air-conditioner that didn’t. “Abandoned by his momma,
and he never knew who his poppa was. It’s okay to call some guys a bastard,
they know it’s only a word, but Dexy grew up with a kind of a chip on his
shoulder, and there’s many a boy and there’s many a man never called him a
bastard twice.