Mr. Bones (19 page)

Working on a bomb a few days before the game, we heard the sound of Mrs. Herkis's high heels on the floor—a sound I had grown to like for the way it suggested her swinging legs—and then her voice at the stairway: “Walter, I'm going shopping. Remember to lock the door if you go out.”

When she had gone, Walter said, “Let's test this one.”

“I hosey the transformer.”

Walter smiled. We wired a bomb and carefully buried it in the usual hole, covering it with loose dirt. Then we crept into the garage. Walter handed me the transformer. I took it and started counting. I pushed the lever and the ground erupted. Dirt was flung up and a cloud of smoke began to rise as I dropped the transformer.

“Wicked pissah! Let's do another one.”

“We only have two left.”

“The last one's for the game.”

“You do this one.”

He rushed over, red-faced, laughing, to look at the damage to the hole, the burned wires, the flecks of metal, the hot steaming earth. He was laughing as he placed the new bomb into the hole. “I want you at that game!” He snipped off the charred strands of wire and peeled the plastic from the gleaming strands. “Okay, I'm going to the game.” He began to twist the wires, connecting the bomb to the trailing wire to the transformer.

He was still talking as the bomb went off, a flash of fire, white and red in the middle of where his hands were, the bang and the brightness. We had never seen a bomb explode above the ground before, and this was very loud and very fiery, followed by a ball of smoke that swept across Walter as he fell back screaming.

He was not dead, but maybe he was dying. He was crouched, clutching his stomach. I ran to him, not knowing what to do. His screaming and crying somewhat reassured me—it meant that he was alive. But his face and his shirt were blackened, soot on his chin, the front of his jacket scorched. But what scared me most were his hands. Shreds of skin hung from his fingers, the skin blackened, his fingers and hands pink and raw, looking badly cooked, like hot dogs tossed on a fire. There was no blood, but the sharp smell of burned skin and hair was just as bad.

Kneeling there, Walter sobbing in pain, I heard a shriek—Walter's mother at the window. And in seconds she was out of the door, rushing up to us, pushing me aside and still howling, dragging Walter into the house.

I coiled the remaining wire, to hide it, and when I came to the transformer I saw that I had left the lever pushed forward. Walter had been connecting live wires. I could hear him screaming upstairs.

“You've been smoking cigarettes,” my mother said when I got home.

“No.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

But the next day everyone knew. “It wasn't me,” I said, but the way I said it hinted that it might have been. The news was so strange and unexpected that now I was teased in a different way, as equals tease each other, admiringly, almost affectionately. I said nothing more about the bomb, just sat, made no explanation. I wanted them to think that it was all my idea. That I had a bomb. That I had blown Walter up. That, if I wished, I could blow them up.

Hoolie said, “You think you're so smart,” but I could tell that he was worried.

A few days later Walter came to school, his hands bandaged so thickly he looked like he was wearing mittens. Part of his face was burned, his chin peeled and red, his hair scorched. But there was defiance in his eyes. He lifted one of his mittens to Quaglia and said, “Rotate.” I envied him a little, because, being badly injured, he looked like a hero. But I was his friend, someone else to be feared, who might do it again.

 

1

 

He knew before he'd been posted to Bangkok that you invented a city, any city, from the little you learned every day by accident. This one you had to make for yourself out of noodles and flowers, a glimpse of the river, an odor of scorched spices, office talk, moisture-thickened air that made you gasp, and neon lights shimmying in puddles—beauty in half an inch of dirty water. Or something you'd seen nowhere else, like the gilded shrines on street corners, flowers and fruit left as offerings, piles of yellow petals, people at prayer, their faces the more soulful for being candlelit in the night.

Then you flew back home and told people, and that was the whole city for them, what you remembered. In Bangkok, the availability of food, of pleasure, of people, made Boyd Osier a little anxious and giggly. Strangers smiled and seemed to know what was in your mind.
Take me!
Taxi!
Massage!
What you want,
sir?
You could possess such a place, the people were so polite.

Believing that it was his last assignment, his working life coming to an end, Osier was more attentive in Bangkok than he'd ever been, with the sorrowful clinging gaze of taking a last look. His company had sent him there. It made components for cell phones, the plant in an industrial area outside the city near the old airport, Don Mueang. The work was American; his life alone was something else. Or was he too old for another overseas assignment without his wife?

Osier's fear was that retirement meant his life would become a vacancy long before he was dead. If he wished to see where the years had gone, he only had to look at his unusual, carefully kept diaries. Instead of pages of scribbles, they were pictorial, a page of sketches a day. He had a small but reliable gift for caricature. His sketches were a relief from accountancy, though perhaps (he told himself) they were another kind of accounting, evaluating the day by illustrating it, the things he saw, the people he met, putting what they said into balloons. He told Joyce he did it for her, because when he was away she always asked, “What's it like there?” But he knew he kept the pictorial diary for himself, to test his talent without any risk, and to record the passage of time, in sketching that had the calming effect of autohypnosis.

Before he left for Bangkok, Joyce had said, “The place I want to live is somewhere I wouldn't mind dying.” That rang true, because in other overseas posts, those short assignments when he'd been auditing the company's books, he'd thought, I would hate to die here—Ireland, Holland, Vancouver, the outsource centers they had developed. Something about the damp, the dark weather-pitted gravestones he'd seen under dripping trees, the insistent cheerfulness of people in the wintry gloom, indoors most of the time, so many of them careworn young people, resigned to their captivity. But Bangkok was his first hot country.

When he arrived, the two other Americans in the company, Larry Wise from Operations and Fred Kegler from Human Services, had befriended him, initiating him with what they'd found out. Their wives, too, were back in the States, so they were sympathetic to him, especially Fred, who cautioned him, telling him how to find a taxi, and a tailor, and what districts to avoid, and good places to eat.

“Sometimes you get a bowl of boogers or a dish of greasy worms that look like garbage, and you think you're going to collapse,” Fred said. “But never mind, they're delicious.”

Fred had an unembarrassed gape-mouthed way of talking, his visibly thrashing tongue turning “collapse” into
clapse.

“They say they're not political”—
plitical
—“but they are. And sometimes someone's smiling and it's not a smile. Or they say no and they mean yes.”

His distracting way with these and certain other words—
meer
and
hoor
for “mirror” and “horror”—made Osier mistrust anything Fred said.

Larry's line was always how simple it was to go home. “Hey, look how near we are to the States. I talk to my wife three times a day. We have conversations. Back home I talk but we never have conversations. Is this an adventure? I don't think so.”

“It seems far to me,” Osier said. “It seems foreign.”

“Foreign I'll give you. But not far. You got here by going through a narrow tunnel at the end of the ramp at the airport in New York. And came out the other end.”

Larry was right: the world was tiny. It was easy to go home.

They lived in the wholly accessible world, Larry said, the small, wired planet. “That's why this company's in profit. Look around. Everybody's always on the phone.” So Osier never asked how he was going home, he only asked when.

But if separately Larry and Fred were sympathetic and helpful, together they lost their subtlety and were simplified, encouraging each other—rowdy, noisier, teasing, two guys at large in this city where, because they could so easily have what they wanted, they became greedier.

“Osier, want to go out for a drink? Get hammered?” Larry said, with Fred by his side.

“How about it? Do yourself a favor. You don't have to make a career of it,” Fred said.
Creer.
This way of speaking also made him seem a mocker.

He went with them once. Larry and Fred brought him to a bar and supervised him.

The Thais did not carouse. They served drinks. They offered food. They offered themselves. Osier squirmed, feeling that he had nothing to offer in return. Every evening after that he said he was busy, because the men still asked. He had not dared to tell them that they'd embarrassed themselves.

Finally they took the hint, believing that Osier was virtuous and a bit dull. They resented him for not joining them, taking it for disapproval, and began to ignore him at work.

And now, as on those other nights when he'd claimed to be busy, Osier was sitting in the cathedral-like waiting room in Bangkok's central railway station under the portrait of King Rama V, going nowhere, as he told himself. Weeks of this—a month, maybe.

He liked the thought that because he was a
farang
no one took any notice of him, that Larry and Fred had no idea he came to the railway station waiting room to catch up on his diary. The diary was his refuge. It was less intrusive than aiming a camera at people, and it made him more observant. The Thais were so slight, so strong, so lovely, even the men and boys. He had learned to draw them in a few strokes, the slim-hipped boys, the slender girls with short hair, the crones who might have been old men. They glided in the muggy air like tropical fish, that same grace and fragility, drifting past him in pairs. The same profile too, some of them, fish-faced with pretty lips.

Their spirit compensated for the hot paved city, which was not lovely at all, the stinking honking traffic, the ugly office buildings. The river was an exception, a rippling thoroughfare of flotsam and needle-nosed motorboats. The temples, the wats, the shrines, housed fat benevolent Buddhas and joyous carved dragons, bathed in a golden glow. People knelt and bowed to pray for favors. This he understood, and envied them their belief. Why else go to church except to give thanks or ask for help? The rituals were full of emotion, addressing the Buddha obliquely with petitions and prayers: offerings, the gongs, the fruit and flowers, the physicality of it, the flames of small oil lamps, the odors of incense, seeming to celebrate their mortality. This veneration made Osier's own churchgoing seem like sorcery.

“How is it there?” Joyce asked from Maine, where she said it was raw. She spoke as though from a mountainside of bare rock and black ice.

How could he reply to this? They'd spent most of their summers in coastal Maine. Joyce looked forward to his retirement, and to the house they'd recently bought in Owls Head. But the mild summers of sea fog, relieved by the dazzle of marine sunshine, had misled them. Now he knew that the other nine months were winter: days of unforgiving wind that slashed your face, days of frost or freezing rain, a weight of cold that slowed you and lay on the night-like days like a stone slab.

“Fine,” he said, shivering at her word “raw.”

He kept to his pictorial diary, the doodles of hats and baskets, the carved finials on temple rooftops, because he had no words to describe the stew of the city—the heat-thickened air, the muddy river, the clean people, the efficiency, the unprovoked smiles, the signs he couldn't read, the language he couldn't speak. And so he asked her how she was, and she always said, “About the same,” which meant her knee was giving her pain. She'd been healthy until her knee began bothering her, and then everything changed. She stopped going for walks, sat more, ate more, got heavy, resigned herself to a life of decline and ill health, and began to resemble her mother, who sat slumped in a nursing home.

Sketching was his hobby, but his work was numbers. Osier headed the accounting office, a job he loved for the order of its elements and the fact that no locals were involved on the money side—they couldn't be, company rule, payroll was secret, locals couldn't know how little they were paid, what profits the company was making, the low overheads. Larry and Fred were not involved either; only he saw the numbers, units shipped, cost per unit; and when the numbers added up he was done. It was forbidden to email any financial information or take any of the data out of the office on CDs. The office, too, was another world.

After phoning his wife, he improved his sketch of the noble portrait of Rama V, King Chulalongkorn, high up on the station wall.

He liked the idea that the orderly station was always in motion, a place of arrivals and departures. No one lingered here, no one to observe him. He was touched by the emotion of the travelers—families seeing loved ones onto trains, parents with toddlers, tense separations; and all the luggage they carried, some of them like campers, carrying bags of food and water. He was one of the few loiterers.

He loved looking at the girls and women—angel-faced, dolled up for their journey, slender, a little nervous, so sweet, waiting for their trains to blink on the departure board. He came to the waiting room twice a week or more, where he was licensed to stare because of his diary. He had a drink, he found food, he called Joyce. It was not a life here, but a refuge and, like most travel he'd known, a suspension of life.